Organizational Development Techniques

Strategy Planning


The M Powered Strategies approach to strategic planning equips public-sector leaders with a practical framework to define direction, design strategy, and organize the work of change. We begin by clarifying strategic intent through discovery and stakeholder engagement to understand whether the organization needs to respond to external change or correct internal misalignment. In the design phase, we co-create a structured roadmap that defines the conditions required to achieve goals and the relationships among efforts. Planning sessions then translate those conditions into time-bound, interdependent projects with clearly assigned responsibilities. We embed governance practices that help leadership stay informed, evaluate progress, and adapt as needed. Unlike traditional strategic planning, which often results in static documents, our approach emphasizes an iterative, collaborative process that integrates strategy execution into the day-to-day rhythm of management.

Uniting Vision and Action Through Strategic Planning

Faced with shifting environmental demands and increasing pressure to deliver public value, a regional forest leadership team needed to prioritize resources and align staff with mission-critical goals. Without a unified strategic direction, decision-making was reactive, and long-term planning lacked coherence.

M Powered Strategies partnered with the forest leadership to co-create a forward-looking, five-year strategic plan. Through structured interviews, document analysis, and a series of facilitated workshops, we helped the team surface key priorities, define measurable goals, and build a clear roadmap for action. The process emphasized transparency, inclusivity, and alignment—ensuring that the strategic plan reflected both leadership vision and staff insights. Our facilitation introduced structured decision-making tools that supported consensus and built ownership at every level.

The strategic plan provided a shared foundation for program alignment, resource allocation, and performance accountability. With a renewed sense of purpose and a clear direction, the leadership team began making more confident, mission-driven decisions. The collaborative planning process not only delivered a practical roadmap—it also strengthened internal cohesion and positioned the organization to adapt more effectively to future challenges.

Mission Oriented Decision Model


Mission-Oriented Decision Modeling (MODM) is a structured, facilitation-based methodology designed to help public-sector and mission-driven organizations make transparent, defensible prioritization decisions in complex, resource-constrained environments. MODM empowers leadership teams to align decisions—such as which projects to fund, roles to fill, or risks to mitigate—directly to their mission priorities. By collaboratively decomposing the organization’s mission into a weighted scaffold of objectives, evaluating decision units against agreed-upon criteria, and producing a sequenced Index of priorities, MPS ensures that each decision reflects the organization’s unique mission context and values. MODM helps organizations shift from reactive decision-making to proactive, repeatable processes that support ongoing governance, resource allocation, and strategic change.

Our approach unfolds across four key phases: Scaffold (defining what matters by breaking down mission priorities), Weight (assigning relative importance to those priorities through stakeholder input), Align & Gauge (evaluating decision items against the scaffold), and Index & Act (sequencing decisions for action). MPS facilitates each step through collaborative workshops, leveraging Excel-based tools, data normalization, and visualization techniques to promote transparency and stakeholder engagement. MODM is especially valuable for teams facing complex trade-offs, such as balancing competing priorities, aligning services to mission outcomes, or optimizing limited resources. The result is a durable, mission-aligned decision framework that enhances accountability, speeds up conversations, and provides a repeatable structure for ongoing decision-making in dynamic environments.

Driving Workforce Alignment with Mission-Oriented Decision Modeling

The leadership team of a large national forest was under pressure to make strategic staffing decisions amid tightening budgets and constraints on permanent hiring. Lacking a clear, transparent process, decisions about which roles to fill often reflected short-term needs rather than long-term mission priorities, creating frustration and limiting the forest’s competitiveness for future funding.

M Powered Strategies introduced our proprietary Mission-Oriented Decision Modeling (MODM) framework to help the forest leadership team align workforce decisions with strategic goals. Through a series of facilitated workshops and interviews, we helped decompose the forest’s mission into enterprise, organizational, and functional priorities. We mapped 180 staff positions to 29 unique roles and assigned relative weights using structured tools to determine each role’s contribution to mission-critical outcomes. By applying MODM’s seven-step process, we produced a transparent, quantifiable decision model that captured each role’s strategic value.

MODM gave the leadership team a repeatable, data-driven process for making staffing decisions, replacing ad hoc approaches with a clearly defined model. This shift led to increased transparency, enhanced internal communication, and a more strategic approach to workforce planning. By integrating MODM, the forest improved its competitiveness for limited funding and reinforced a culture of accountability and mission alignment. The process also served as a blueprint for broader organizational planning, positioning the forest to respond more effectively to future challenges.

Problem Discovery Mapping


Problem Discovery Mapping (PDM) is a participatory, visual facilitation technique that helps leadership teams untangle complex organizational challenges. Designed for moments when teams feel stuck—circling around symptoms, frustrations, or uncertainties—PDM transforms fragmented conversations into a structured, shared understanding of the issues at hand. Through collaborative workshops, M Powered Strategies guides participants in capturing, categorizing, and visually mapping the interconnected problems that contribute to persistent challenges. The result is a cause-and-effect diagram that makes the invisible visible, fostering alignment, clarifying ownership, and surfacing actionable next steps. PDM is especially useful when teams need to break through analysis paralysis, identify points of leverage, and build momentum for change.

MPS delivers PDM engagements as focused, time-efficient workshops, typically completed in a single day. Our facilitators lead clients through four structured phases: identifying core problems, uncovering contributing components, mapping relationships, and developing an action-oriented roadmap. PDM is not a root cause analysis or a solution-generation tool—it is a diagnostic lens that clarifies what problems to tackle and where to start. It can serve as a precursor to deeper strategic work, such as process improvement, team development, or mission-oriented decision-making. PDM fits seamlessly into public-sector contexts, respecting time and resource constraints while creating space for honest dialogue, consensus building, and collaborative problem-solving.

Aligning Regional Leadership Through Problem Discovery Mapping

A leadership team overseeing six national forests sought to improve the effectiveness of their meetings and strengthen collaboration among supervisors. Despite regular coordination, their discussions lacked structure, actionable outcomes, and cohesion, hindering their ability to make strategic, zone-wide decisions in a timely and unified manner.

M Powered Strategies transformed their meeting culture and team dynamics with Problem Discovery Mapping (PDM), a structured technique that helped surface underlying challenges, clarify priorities, and guide the group through collaborative problem-solving. By adapting Lencioni’s Five Behaviors model to their needs, our workshops fostered open dialogue and trust among the leadership team. We also helped the team launch a charter process to define the role of District Rangers in supporting zone-level initiatives and shared outcomes.

The team adopted a more disciplined, impactful meeting format, including monthly in-person sessions and rotating to guide discussions. With improved alignment, the team became better positioned to share personnel, scale restoration efforts, and address landscape-level challenges collectively. The charter framework set the stage for broader ranger collaboration, increased leadership cohesion, and enhanced decision-making. Through structured facilitation and strategic engagement, MPS empowered the team to operate as a unified leadership body with clearer purpose and greater mission impact.

Work of Leaders


The Work of Leaders (WoL) assessment is built over the DiSC profile, focusing you on understanding your tendencies that increase your effectiveness. It answers the question, “How do you show up as a leader and leadership to your organization’s constituents and staff?” Taken at the individual level, and aggregated for a group view of your leadership team, the MPS workshop uses the assessment to help each leader apply their natural tendencies to three best practice areas:  Crafting a Vision, Building Alignment, Championing Execution. These practices differ from management in that leaders operate in a one-to-many relationship with the organization. Each of the processes is assessed through 3 drivers, or indicators, and the intensity of related practices that your team shares.  

Useful for leadership teambuilding, brainstorming and action planning, this Work of Leaders assessment and workshop will help your leadership team get to higher level performance in a more natural way, as each member considers their natural style that leads to individual leadership success. 

Unlocking Leadership Potential, Elevating Leadership Team Performance

A national forest leadership team sought to improve follow-through and accountability in decision-making. While strategic discussions were frequent, translating those ideas into consistent action across the team remained a challenge.

M Powered Strategies delivered a targeted Work of Leaders assessment and workshop, tailored to the team’s operational context. We guided each leader through a structured self-assessment, followed by interactive sessions focused on championing execution—the final and often most difficult phase of the leadership process. Leaders explored how their individual styles influenced execution and practiced communication and follow-up techniques designed to enhance clarity and drive accountability.

The leadership team reported immediate improvements in team accountability and clarity around next steps. Leaders gained tools to track commitments, ensure follow-through, and reinforce priorities. As a result, execution improved across key initiatives, and the team began operating with greater cohesion and shared responsibility. The workshop catalyzed a shift toward a more action-oriented leadership culture, better equipped to meet the forest’s evolving challenges.

Work Styles and Strengths


DiSC

DiSC is a personality assessment tool that helps individuals understand their behavior, communication, teamwork, and leadership styles in a work environment. It is based on the DiSC model, which categorizes behaviors into four primary personality trains: Dominance (D), Influence (i), Steadiness (S), and Conscientiousness (C).

MPS offers a three-hour interactive workshop that provides insights into the assessment and goes through examples of how this is used in workplaces to improve collaboration, enhance self-awareness, and develop effective interpersonal skills. Participants will have lifetime access to the Catalyst website where they can see their assessment as well as others within their group, explore how they can better work with each of their colleagues, and gain an even deeper insight into how their DiSC style affects their workplace behavior.

Clifton Strengths

Start with Talent – Finish with Strength. Grounded in the field of positive psychology, with an understanding that people are complex and not just labels from an assessment, Clifton Strengths is a way of building improved performance at work. Our greatest potential lies in areas where we are already talented. The gap is that we do not often identify and reflect on our talents. The Strengths assessment, our 4-hour workshops and individual coaching, help you find and express your dominant talents of a well-studied list of 34.

A tenet of Strengths is that people need people. Our workshops also engage teams for interpersonal development and to find opportunities to improve overall team interaction and productivity. Strengths are linked in four management domains: Executing, Relationship Building, Influencing, Strategic Thinking. With managers and teams, we look at the distribution of naturally occurring behaviors that the team has across domains, challenging thing on work performance, team output and improved mission focus. The team work builds the team’s capacity to understand each other and to find new ways of getting work done. We also use Strengths with managers specifically, to help them explore how they can find productive ways of helping their teams perform at their best.

From Conflict to Collaboration: Overcoming Team Challenges in Multi-Agency Public Lands Management

A multi-agency training organization for public lands management was grappling with internal conflict, unclear roles, and fractured communication. Leadership transitions and complex governance structures had strained relationships and weakened team cohesion, making it difficult to fulfill the center’s mission effectively.

M Powered Strategies led a targeted intervention that included individual and team-based CliftonStrengths® coaching. Each staff member completed the assessment to uncover their unique strengths, followed by one-on-one coaching sessions to deepen self-awareness and personal development. In facilitated workshops, we brought the team together to explore how individual strengths contributed to collective performance. We connected insights from the assessment to real workplace challenges, helping staff understand how to better collaborate and leverage one another’s capabilities.

The team experienced a marked improvement in mutual understanding and collaboration. Participants reported a deeper appreciation for each other’s strengths and a renewed sense of purpose in their roles. The sessions fostered trust, reduced interpersonal friction, and gave leaders practical strategies to manage conflict and increase engagement. By focusing on what each team member does best, the Carhart Center began operating with greater cohesion, resilience, and clarity—better positioned to meet its inter-agency objectives.

Interpersonal Dynamics


EQ-i

The EQ-i assessment is a self-awareness tool that measures your engagement with 16 specifically defined elements of Emotional Intelligence. It is a reliable and valid instrument that compares participants’ responses with those of a normed group; offering valuable insight into each participant’s emotional competencies. Designed to promote individual engagement and interpretation, the assessment serves as a highly actionable tool for personal, professional, leadership, team, or organizational development.

Participants will be taken through an interactive workshop where they will gain a deeper understanding of each of the elements, engage in activities that explore strengths and weaknesses within the workplace, and explore peer coaching within small groups. Individuals will be able to create action plans for three elements they’d like to strengthen over time; leaving with a go-forward plan for each individual.

Agile EQ

Agile EQ combines personalized insights of DiSC with active emotional intelligence. This assessment focuses on the emotional and interpersonal needs of workplace interactions. In a three-hour workshop, participants will engage in activities and discussions that will uncover mindsets that shape natural responses and interactions. This assessment also empowers participants to stretch beyond their mindsets to meet the demands of any situation with agility.

The DiSC Agile EQ assessment builds off of the DiSC Workplace assessment. By taking the Agile EQ, you will gain access to the Catalyst website. This lifetime access offers a chance for further exploration into the modules MPS will take participants though during the workshop. MPS is happy to offer a discount for participants who have already taken the initial DiSC Assessment via Cataly.

Conflict Management

Productive management hinges on strong conflict management skills. Unmanaged conflict represents one of the most significant avoidable costs organizations encounter, yet effective conflict management skills are frequently lacking or inadequate. Reflexive reactions—such as fight, flight, or freeze—typically dominate responses to conflict, undermining both organizational culture and productivity while exposing the organization to unnecessary risks. The good news is that mastering effective conflict management skills is entirely achievable!

We delve into three perspectives: self-awareness, relationship and interactions, and contextual awareness for enhanced professional conduct. Additionally, we offer Conflict Coaching to equip individuals with the necessary skills to navigate and manage conflicts more adeptly. The MPS conflict management training emphasizes self-awareness and developing positive interpersonal dynamics within the workplace. This transformative approach mitigates conflicts and also enhances resilience, reduces stress, boosts morale, and promotes more effective communication and collaboration. 

5 Behaviors®


Patrick Lencioni’s Five Behaviors of a Cohesive Team is a proven management framework for building high-performing teams. The model unlocks a team’s full potential by addressing both individual and collective needs—cultivating a culture grounded in Trust, Productive Conflict, Commitment, Accountability, and a shared focus on Results. These five interconnected behaviors form a self-reinforcing framework that strengthens over time and supports long-term team success.

Through team profiles and interactive sessions, participants gain actionable insight into how their team functions—and how it can improve. The model is especially effective for launching new teams, on-boarding new members, and reinforcing norms within established groups, ensuring that every team member contributes to collective results as the team evolves. We integrate the Five Behaviors framework with other tools for collaboration, decision-making, interpersonal communication, and role clarity. Our certified facilitators deliver customized workshops using Wiley’s Everything DiSC® and Five Behaviors® assessments, helping teams apply these principles to their unique dynamics and goals.

From Fragmentation to Alignment: Leadership Development for National Forest Collaboration

Forest Supervisors across six national forests within a region faced persistent challenges in collaboration and decision-making. Variability in leadership styles and legacy communication patterns hindered alignment, diluted accountability, and impacted the team’s ability to respond effectively to regional priorities.

M Powered Strategies delivered a customized leadership development intervention grounded in the Five Behaviors of a Cohesive Team® model. Using this proven framework, we facilitated in-person workshops designed to address trust, conflict, commitment, accountability, and results. Prior to the sessions, we conducted stakeholder interviews to identify core dynamics and align the content with real operational concerns. Through guided exercises and open dialogue, leaders explored how trust and vulnerability underpin effective teamwork and engaged in constructive conflict to clarify expectations and strengthen accountability.

The team emerged with greater psychological safety, clearer communication norms, and stronger alignment around shared goals. Leaders adopted new practices to support accountability and role clarity, including the implementation of a framework for leading future meetings. The process deepened relationships and elevated the team’s ability to collaborate across forest boundaries. By anchoring their development in the Five Behaviors model, the regional team took significant strides toward becoming a high-performing, unified leadership body.

Key Results Area


Your organization’s success depends on outcomes—but outcomes don’t just happen. People produce outcomes, and those outcomes are shaped by how roles are defined and connected. MPS helps you (re)design roles that serve as the building blocks of a high-performing organization. Each role is set within a nested accountability and decision-making framework, with specific responsibilities, outputs, and outcomes that link directly to your organization’s key results. The result is a clear line of sight from individual contributions to overall mission success.

Our facilitators work one-on-one with your managers to identify the Key Results Areas and related outcomes for each cornerstone role in your organization. These focused sessions clarify accountability, responsibilities, and the authority individuals need to succeed. We culminate the process with a team workshop, where leaders validate and share their role designs—aligning the team around a common purpose. The rigor of the KRA process fosters clarity, builds commitment, reduces interpersonal conflict, and strengthens accountability. It also lays the foundation for effective succession planning by creating excitement and ownership around roles. Let MPS help your management team unlock their full potential.

Designing for Results: Reshaping Leadership to Achieve Mission

As a nonprofit approached the centennial celebration of the public lands it is dedicated to protecting, its leadership recognized that the existing organizational structure could not support the evolving strategic vision. Misalignment at the senior leadership level and performance issues in both development and finance functions appeared to create organizational bottlenecks, inhibiting progress.

M Powered Strategies discovered deep structural challenges that extended beyond just isolated performance concerns. Using our Key Results Area (KRA) technique, we co-developed a redesigned leadership structure grounded in defined outcomes, clear accountability, and decision-making authority. We introduced two new executive roles—Chief Growth Officer and Chief Financial and Administrative Officer—and refined responsibilities across the leadership team. Through iterative interviews and facilitated sessions, we established clear role interfaces and redesigned reporting relationships. Our approach included knowledge transfer to internal leaders, enabling sustained implementation.

The new structure reduced interpersonal conflict, increased throughput, and boosted staff engagement. Clarifying roles helped empower leadership, allowed staff to take ownership of outcomes, and created space for candid self-assessment. The Board endorsed the redesign, and we extended the role definition process to board leadership and committee chairs, ensuring alignment from governance to execution. The organization emerged with a leadership team positioned to drive its next chapter of mission impact.