About Us

To Help You “Make the Difference”

The short answer to these questions is: Capacity.  We help our clients develop the awareness, skills, tools, processes, and strategies that help you “make the difference.”

Practical Value to Clients – Not Just Theory, but Useful Tools & Skills

Sea-Change’s training and assistance should be measured by the tangible, bottom line value we deliver to our clients.  Sea-Change professionals work closely with clients and program participants to ensure the practical relevance of our assistance.  We expect to be judged by the true value we add to our clients’ capacity.

Commitment to Building Our Clients’ Capacity, Not Dependency

Sea-Change professionals don’t just solve problems for our clients; we help our clients become better problem-solvers…and more.  In everything we do with our clients, we see a chance to help our clients need us less over time.  Our fundamental approach to client relationships is to see ourselves as a resource for making our clients better at what they do – and better able to cope with strategic challenges.

Improving Processes

Part of helping our clients improve what they do is in helping them build skills, adopt better habits, increase their awareness, and question important assumptions.  But we also encourage our clients to be better “process thinkers;” devoting sufficient time and effort to improving the way they learn and the way they apply what they learn over time.

The Best of Experience, Practice, and Theory

Sea-Change Partners is not simply a “soft skills training organization.”  We are practitioners at the tops of our respective fields, with experience working at the highest levels of business and government in more than 120 countries, worldwide.  We have also trained and taught at the world’s most prestigious institutions in our respective fields.  We combine experience in high-stakes situations with the best, most practical pedagogy available.  Our learning approaches are not cut-and-paste training programs.  Our consultants don’t simply read a book and then give advice or training based on someone else’s ideas.  We are not people with sales experience who think they are experts in Negotiation, nor are we people who claim to be experts in Leadership because they once served as a manager.  We do not claim to be experts in Crisis Management because we survived one crisis situation.  We are experts in Crisis Management because we have been involved in dozens of crisis situations, of all types, around the world.  Our senior professionals have extensive experience as practitioners, advisors, and trainers in all of our critical areas of expertise.

Beyond “Best Practices:” Questioning Assumptions and Conventional Wisdom

Sea-Change professionals are highly-qualified individuals who are constantly trying to improve the way the world puts various skills into practice.  Our methods of curriculum development are not to research others’ “best practices” and re-sell them to our clients.  As a learning organization ourselves; Sea-Change Partners professionals are constantly questioning what we learn and critiquing so-called conventional wisdom.  We don’t just help to “fine-tune” what our clients do…We aim to help them revolutionize what they do

Practical Skills Training

At Sea-Change, “those who can do; teach.”  Theory is most useful when based on practice.  And practice is most effective when based on solid theory and the best research.  Our commitment is to marry the best of theory and practice in ways that result in the best training programs in each of our practice areas.

Our experts are practitioners and experienced teachers and trainers.  Most of our senior professionals have worked as practitioners at the top of their respective fields, and they have experience teaching and training at some of the world’s top universities and other institutions.  We combine a wealth of international experience, at all levels, with some of the best pedagogy available, to ensure that our clients receive the best – and most practical — skills training anywhere.

We work with our clients to design interactive and engaging training courses that help them to improve their bottom-line results.

Executive Coaching

Sea-Change professionals are among the world’s most expert coaches in their fields of expertise.  Every top athlete in the world depends on a professional coach, and it is the best athletes who benefit the most from good coaching.  We offer focused coaching for individual professionals in order to enhance their skills, improve their performance, and achieve better bottom-line results.  Sea-Change has a team of experienced professionals who will develop and implement a customized program of coaching and strategic assistance, in consultation with our clients.

Our coaching programs include initial baseline needs assessments; to align the coaching sessions with our clients’ learning objectives, to assess strengths and areas of need, and to set appropriate targets.  We then ensure that our coaches help our clients get the most out of themselves by being skilled and prepared for upcoming tasks – and by having well-designed strategies for dealing with the challenges they face.

Our coaching sessions usually include a mix of focused skills training, applied work on – and preparation for — real challenges, assisted practice in simulations and role-plays, and assessments, feedback and reporting.  Sessions can be scheduled to accommodate our clients’ needs and schedules.  Typical sessions are a half day (3 hours of coaching), and we work with our clients to determine the most appropriate setting.  Depending on the challenges they face, some clients benefit from a formal, structured environment, such as their own workplace, while others benefit more from an informal setting, away from the office.

Expert Strategic Assistance

We help our clients in real situations.  As practitioners, we help our clients address urgent and important issues, challenges, and problems, and we help our clients develop strategies and action plans in order to create – and make the most of – vital opportunities.

The strategic assistance — and advice – that we provide ranges from helping our clients prepare for a critical negotiation or leadership challenge, or deal with a major conflict or crisis; to coping with sudden – or overwhelming – change, or fighting corruption and strengthening integrity systems.

Public sector and private sector clients, alike, depend on Sea-Change Partners for advice, support, and other forms of assistance on some of their most important strategic issues and challenges.

Customized Simulations and Scenarios

Because Negotiation, Influence, Leadership, Conflict Management, Crisis Management, Governance, and fighting corruption are all activities, like a sport; practice is an essential part of improving skills, designing strategies, and “exercising your muscles.”  Practice means actually engaging in these activities.  However, the risk of “learning-by-doing” in real situations tends to be high; because there are real stakes – and, therefore, real consequences.  We help our clients benefit from “real” practice, but without the real risk, by developing customized simulations and realistic scenarios that are based on our clients’ actual challenges.

Sea-Change works with our clients to create simulations of their most common activities, their most important activities, and/or their most challenging situations.

• By simulating their most common situations, clients have useful internal training tools that can be used again and again, over time, to train new recruits, to practice new strategies, to experiment with new approaches, and to maintain and enhance the skill sets of all the people in the organization.

• By simulating their most important situations, clients can improve their chances of success when the stakes are highest by making mistakes far less likely, and by not missing important opportunities.  We also help to ensure that our clients don’t send people into an important situation unprepared.  When you are facing an important challenge, you should never be experiencing it for real the first time.  Whenever possible, good strategists make sure they have experienced the situation in a simulation before they actually face it for real.

• By simulating their most challenging situations, clients can make sure they are doing everything possible to succeed against the odds.  It is often far more difficult to solve a problem, or to overcome an obstacle, while you’re under pressure at the table or in the field, than it is to do so with the pressures removed.  Often the best way to design an approach to deal with challenges is in a simulation, where clients can adjust variables, experiment with different approaches, and better estimate potential consequences – without actually suffering them.  And by practicing challenging situations, our clients develop the kinds of skills — and confidence – that make most routine challenges far easier to face.

We want our clients to feel like they have “seen it all” by the time they get to the table.

Other Services

Some of the services we offer are specific to our areas of expertise.  We offer services such as diagnostic analysis, evaluations, 360-degree feedback, mediation, facilitation, process design, and more, depending on the intersections of our clients’ needs and our capabilities.

In addition to our core team, we maintain a wide network of professionals who are very good at what they do.  And, if we are not the best people to provide a particular service, we’ll do what we can to refer our clients to the best people we know.

Give us a call, and we’ll see how we can help you…