Draw the Curtain, our first tier, allows a broader looking into issues regarding race, ethnicity and culture. It is structured to allow ample time for conversations that are generally avoided or don’t occur in ultra formatted training. One of our goals is to provide a safe place to ask questions participants may not know or understand the answer to; however, we don’t stop there. With Discovery, and all of our tiers, our primary goal is to guide our group of participants to tangible and actionable steps they can take after the course. We try to steer to as much specificity as possible so participants walk out of the room knowing what they can do next. In Discovery, we also introduce our Action Agreement. This lays a foundation for everybody’s personal journey with culture.

Unlock the Latch, our tier 2 course, focuses on applying specific leadership and communication theories to culture. In this session, we walk through concepts such as communication, conflict management, change management, sympathy, empathy, apathy, motivation and empowerment and diversity-specific exercises in order to see how these theories can help navigate participants through cultural growth and conflict. We guide participants through exercises to test implementation as well as discuss ways to easily recognize when to incorporate them. Again, our primary goal is to guide our group of participants to tangible and actionable steps, so participants leave this course having developed action steps incorporating the theories they’ve learned throughout the day.

Open Your Window is our third tier. It is an intense, and practicum-based, focus on culture. Execute is a course reserved for those who’ve walked through Discover and Plan, as it can be a guided tour through extremely difficult conversation and even more difficult practice. Unlike Discover and Plan, Execute has one main activity that challenges participants’ prejudices, requires them to extend their thought processes and helps give them a place to safely practice them. Again, our primary goal is to guide our group of participants to tangible and actionable steps. In Execute, we discussed what those actions are earlier in the course and practice implementation of those concepts in order for participants to leave having already gained confidence in those areas of action.

Keep it Open

Training is only the initial step to evolving into an Open Window Culture. While it helps to get the process going, every organization can grow beyond there initial step. We call it Evolve. During this phase of the process, we’ll continually work an organization to create and evaluate processes that will consistently grow your organization. Our primary goal is to help create and implement actions that provide one degree of change consistently. We know that doesn’t sound like a lot, but the direction of any organization can change vastly with small and deliberate action.