We are.

how we gather.

MISSION

We grow cultures. We catalyze good organizations into world class leaders in teamwork, morale, and innovation; schools and workplaces so compelling that new hires would move across country for the chance to contribute to and benefit from life-serving cultures.

VISION

We envision a world where it is well understood that our way of engaging in twos, threes and groups, determines everything. In this world, workplace dynamics is not an afterthought, but the primary competitive advantage for attracting and retaining top talent.

PARADIGM

We make no attempt to hide our prejudice. Ours is a bias toward group etiquette; how members of a team interact with one another.

The Frame Changers approach 1.] focuses on the shapes that groups of people take on different occasions and 2.] makes micro-adjustments to those configurations to achieve macro-gains in the energetics and morale of the institution at large.

Advisory Board

  • Frida Rundell, PhD, LPC

    International Institute for Restorative Practices professor and founding faculty member and author of The Art of Narrative

  • Dr. Will Bledsoe

    Restorative-Communication Trainer, professor and author of The Restorative Way

  • Hannah Flüchter

    Sachgebietsleitung - German Child Protection Agency Head for the City of Dusseldorf

“Working with Frame Changers has the effect of disrupting traditional ways of thinking about problems and prompting deep reflection on the tensions between the challenges and the goals within your organization. It’s about recentering on where it is that you are heading. And why.”

-Dr. Marc Smith, Superintendent

“Ben is our go-to problem guy. He flips a problem on its head so we can remove what’s blocking us in order to step into the next chapter.”

Carrie Allen, Founder of

Which came First?

The institution’s Culture or its way of running meetings

Lead Coach & trainer

Ben Emery

In 2004, Ben had a run-in with the police…

What Leaders are saying…

  • Sarah Gale

    Sarah Gale, Judge on Project Runway Australia & Founder of Wearing Your Worth

    “Ben’s work really is super powerful in that I stepped into a new power in myself. It takes me a few days to integrate our sessions ...so much energy is released."

  • Andy Ridgway - CEO/Co-Founder of Everybody Counts U.K.

    “Ben was an enormous help through a very challenging period for Everybody Counts. Talking through the challenges of running a company gave my perspective a reboot. I genuinely looked forward to our sessions together.”

  • Ericka Metevier, Jostens

    "It was great to work with Ben and to have him help with a familiar problem in a new way. Ben’s approach and his coaching allowed me to tackle a problem in smaller pieces for attainable solutions."

Hear Ben introduce the concept of Restorative Justice on the Man About Town show with David Alexander

For macro-gains, try micro adjustments

Family Systems Constellations & Organizational Reframing

Think of it as a love letter to the decedents of your family or your organization.

  • Originating in Germany in the 1990s, the work draws from family systems therapy and indigenous wisdom, particularly the Zulu approach to ancestral “maintenance”. The modality views those challenges so often understood as “personal”, through a multi-generational lens. In this way, personal problems are revealed instead as systemic entanglements to be honored and worked with.

  • Clients are led either individually or in a group setting by a facilitator; appointing representatives to stand as family members or elements of the family system. Arranging representatives in physical space, invites them to speak, move, and interact. Invisible intergenerational patterns and hidden loyalties are brought into sharp focus, widening the client's perspective and exposing previously unseen solutions.

  • -Get unstuck

    -Replace tired habits with simple next actions

    -Free yourself from the debilitating affects of the story that you tell yourself about the problem

    -Swap running from to moving toward

    -Provide advance healing for your descendants

Whole Staff Micro Workshops

Workplace Drama As Opportunity

  • Plug the employee turnover leak and see a spike in morale without putting day to day operations on hold.

  • There are two kinds of workplaces: the kind where speaking up initiates constructive conversation and the kind where it lands you on the naughty list.

    Imagine a workplace where every employee from top to bottom collaborates to continually improve the wellbeing, means of contribution, and means of support for all team members.

    Imagine that doing so uncorks a well spring of micro-innovations that would have otherwise remained dormant under the surface of more conventional hierarchies.

    Immediate improvements in workplace morale do not require hunger strikes or HR memorandums, but a few hours with a seasoned facilitator.

Burnout *180

  • Breaking point. What might an organization look like, if it didn’t wait for it’s people to collapse to start the conversation?

    The Burnout *180 is that conversation.

  • The Burnout 180* workshop sidesteps the coping mechanism cornucopia in favor of the hard labor of workplace dynamics.

    America defines burnout as something that happens to the individual. No doubt that individual nurses, teachers, law enforcement, administrators, social workers are drained. But herein lies the problem. Our individual centered understanding of burnout skirts our collective illiteracy where woundedness and group support is concerned. Our every-man-for-himself responses to trauma may itself be causing as many people to drop as the traumatizing work itself.

The Restorative Classroom

  • Restorative Practices (RP) is an emerging social science focused on building relationships, repairing harm and fostering the kind of group intelligence and classroom sensibility we all could have benefited from but rarely experienced.

  • Fighting. Girl Drama. Bullying. Under-the-breath Racism.

    Most schools approach such phenomenon like an infection to be eradicated. What if… Such conflicts are the renewable energy source that so many poverty-mindset school systems overlook in their perpetual quest for more funding?

    Leveraging conflict to forge hearty, agile and respect-rich school communities is simpler than one would think and harder than most are willing to undertake. What separates cohesive schools from the halls of estrangement is not how many conflicts arise, but how the classroom responds to any given incident.

    Start the conversation where you are.

 

Trauma & The Soul’s Gold

Grief Literacy workshop for educators and Helping professionals

“He doesn’t ask us to feel better. He asks us to sorrow skillfully, openly; within earshot of young people.”

-Carl Austin Hyatt, 2020 Piscataqua Grantee & MacDowell Fellow Photographer