The DesignShop Methodology has been used for over 40 years to help Fortune 500 companies, government agencies, NGOs, and industry leaders solve their most complex challenges. But unlike traditional strategic planning models—which are often slow, fragmented, and disconnected from execution—DesignShop offers a highly immersive, collaborative, and accelerated approach to creating breakthroughs.
Originally developed by Matt Taylor, a pioneer in collaborative intelligence and systems thinking, DesignShop has been an elite methodology reserved for organizations able to invest $500K or more into transformational work. Today, thanks to the collaboration of Chad Lefevre (Co-Founder of TMIC) and Matt’s Taylor, this methodology is available to a broader range of businesses without compromising its impact.
Through our facilitation practice, we bring DesignShop to organizations that are ready for more than incremental change. If you’re seeking real alignment, clarity across leadership, and scalable systems for innovation and execution—this process is built for you.
Why the DesignShop Methodology Works
Traditional meetings and strategy sessions often give the illusion of progress, but in reality, they tend to reinforce silos and create only surface-level alignment. People come into the room carrying their departmental lens, their individual priorities, and their unspoken assumptions. The agenda usually gets consumed by updates and debate rather than synthesis.
What emerges at the end of those sessions is not real alignment, but a fragile truce. Each leader leaves with their own interpretation of the conversation, their own priorities intact, and a silent plan to “make it work” inside their corner of the business. That’s why, a week later, nothing has truly shifted. Everyone heard the same words, but they didn’t see the same picture.
These conventional formats almost guarantee that the loudest voices dominate, the quietest insights stay hidden, and the deeper systemic patterns never get surfaced. It’s not that these meetings are wrong; it’s that they’re not designed to produce the kind of breakthroughs complex organizations need.
By contrast, a well-designed facilitation environment disrupts this pattern entirely. It pulls people out of the swirl of status updates and turf protection, into a structure that forces the whole system to be visible at once. When that happens, decisions come from shared understanding, not from negotiation.
DesignShop breaks that cycle by creating the conditions for:
Immersive, Cross-Functional Collaboration: This isn’t a typical offsite. DesignShop brings together leadership, subject matter experts, and key stakeholders in a highly facilitated, outcome-focused environment. It’s about designing the future together, not in isolation.
Rapid Iteration & Prototyping: Instead of long cycles of analysis and PowerPoints, teams move through structured cycles of ideation, testing, refinement, and validation. This accelerates decision-making and minimizes resistance to change.
System-Level Thinking: Most business problems aren’t isolated—they’re deeply interconnected. DesignShop engages diverse perspectives to reveal patterns, surface root issues, and identify leverage points that unlock sustainable progress.
Designed Environments for High-Stakes Work: Physical and energetic space matters. DesignShop environments are intentionally designed to activate creativity, focus attention, and support deep cognitive and collaborative work.
Facilitated Breakthroughs (Not Brainstorms): DesignShop is led by trained facilitators who hold the space, guide the process, and help participants challenge assumptions, reframe problems, and unlock possibilities that would otherwise remain hidden.
When to Use a DesignShop
DesignShop is not just a workshop—it’s a transformation engine. It’s built for the moments when linear thinking fails, when conventional meetings fall short, and when alignment isn’t a luxury, it’s a necessity.
This methodology thrives in environments where complexity, ambiguity, and competing priorities are the norm. It’s especially effective when:
- Leadership teams are facing critical decisions or major transitions
Whether it’s a strategic pivot, a merger, or entering new markets, DesignShop creates the space and structure to surface unseen risks, unify perspectives, and generate real alignment at speed. - Organizations are growing rapidly and need scalable systems
Growth without intentional structure breeds chaos. DesignShop helps teams design operating systems that evolve with them—building clarity, capacity, and cohesion into every layer. - Companies are stuck in strategic gridlock or cultural misalignment
When the strategy looks good on paper but doesn’t gain traction, or when departments are pulling in different directions, DesignShop exposes the real friction points and helps redesign from the inside out. - Cross-functional teams are solving complex, layered problems
These problems require more than siloed expertise—they need collective intelligence. DesignShop enables diverse voices to converge around a shared map of the challenge, making the invisible visible and the complex actionable. - Visionary leaders are ready to reimagine how their organization works
DesignShop isn’t about incremental change. It’s for leaders who want to reshape the way decisions are made, how teams collaborate, and what culture looks like in motion. It’s for those building not just better answers—but better questions.
What DesignShop Sessions Typically Lead To
DesignShop isn’t a think tank or a feel-good offsite. It’s a catalyst for real, systemic movement. When applied with intention, it accelerates alignment, upgrades team intelligence, and shifts how work gets done—permanently.
Here’s what organizations consistently walk away with:
- Breakthrough insights that clarify the core challenge
Often, the presenting problem is just a symptom. DesignShop helps teams dig beneath assumptions to reveal the real issues—whether that’s an outdated business model, a broken feedback loop, or an unspoken power dynamic. These insights create the conditions for true transformation, not just surface fixes. - Full alignment across leadership and key stakeholders
Most misalignment isn’t about disagreement—it’s about unseen divergence. Through shared mapping, real-time synthesis, and structured dialogue, DesignShop ensures everyone is seeing the same landscape, speaking the same language, and committing to the same future. This creates alignment that sticks. - Actionable strategies that are co-created and committed to
When people help design the solution, they’re more invested in its success. DesignShop turns passive participants into co-architects of strategy, which not only leads to better ideas—but greater ownership. The strategies produced aren’t hypothetical—they’re immediately executable, because they’re built by the people who will drive them forward. - New operational patterns that support scalable execution
Strategy without structure leads to breakdown. DesignShop sessions often reveal where systems, processes, or decision flows are holding the team back. From this clarity, new patterns are designed—ones that are agile, scalable, and built to support the next phase of growth. - A measurable increase in collaborative intelligence across your team
DesignShop isn’t just about solving one problem—it leaves behind new ways of thinking, communicating, and creating together. Teams begin to notice sharper listening, faster synthesis, and deeper trust. Collaborative intelligence becomes a cultural asset, not just a session outcome.
Why I Facilitate DesignShop
I’m not here to tell you what to do. You already have the answers—you just need the right space to surface them. Most leadership teams are carrying extraordinary intelligence and insight, but those insights are scattered, buried under the noise of the day-to-day. My role is to create the conditions where those insights can come to the surface, be seen by everyone at once, and be turned into action that actually moves things forward.
My work is focused on designing the environment where clarity becomes inevitable. When you bring a team out of the swirl and into a structure built for focus, it changes the game. Suddenly, the conversations that felt circular begin to converge. People stop defending positions and start building solutions together. You can feel the system itself start to shift—from chaos to co-created clarity.
I bring a team with deep training in transformational systems, organizational operations, and facilitation design to every engagement. Our single focus: help your business make real decisions faster, with more alignment and less friction.
And this is not about incremental change. It’s not about rearranging the furniture or tinkering at the edges. This is about stepping out of autopilot and intentionally designing what’s next—on purpose—so that the structure of your business finally matches the scale of your vision.
When that alignment happens, energy is released. And what once felt heavy and complicated begins to flow again.
Let’s Talk
If you’re facing complexity, misalignment, or a moment of reinvention, a DesignShop may be exactly what your organization needs. This is not a generic off-site or another workshop full of sticky notes. It’s a rigorously designed experience that pulls your leadership team out of reaction mode and into deep clarity on what matters most.
Custom packages start at $50K and scale based on scope and outcomes. That investment buys you something priceless: months (sometimes years) of forward progress, unlocked in a matter of days. The return isn’t just in better decisions—it’s in the alignment, speed, and confidence your team takes with them back into the business.
Reach out to explore whether this methodology is right for you. We’ll talk about what’s happening inside your organization, where you need to go, and whether a DesignShop is the right container for that shift. If it is, we’ll design a process tailored to your goals so that, for once, the weight of progress doesn’t sit on your shoulders alone.
You bring the willingness to step back from the noise. We’ll bring the structure that makes clarity inevitable.