While every context is unique, we have found that bringing real solutions to life requires strong relationships, sound design, creative capacity, and efficient execution. To help leaders and teams realize their ambitions, we support and train them in these areas in the early stages and throughout the life of the project. With our help, projects are more resilient to internal tensions and more creative and effective in their work.

Relationships: A Strong Container

The foundation of every project is its team — its people. But assembling competent people and sufficient resources is only the beginning. After that, teams often suffer internal tensions, power struggles, misunderstandings, and myriad forms of breakdown — and the foundations are thereby weakened.

Magenta takes special care to prepare, train, and support a team in its “building a container,” a robust, resilient, capable community that can quickly resolve tensions, support personal and leadership development, and continually up their game. This is the “inner work” of being an amazing team throughout a project’s inevitable challenges.

Without this work, the team can easily become fragile, inefficient, and fragmented — a condition that can last only so long before it ruptures. Want a strong team? Build strong relationships.

Design: Get to the Source of Problems and Solutions

Our toughest challenges are extensions of our ideas, beliefs, cultures, and histories As humans are both physical as well as "inner" beings, our challenges are comprised of both visible and invisible aspects. In this sense, the complex social challenge is a society’s collective inner life writ large. Racism, poverty, violence, pollution — all this stems from what Emerson called “the master ideas reigning in the minds of many persons” — what systems thinking calls “paradigms.”

Well designed social and institutional impact projects must take into account the root causes of the challenge they want to address. Magenta specializes in helping leaders and teams identify the primary, invisible, and driving causes of their toughest challenges, and incorporate them into a sound project design. We use systems thinking, mapping, interviews, desk research, and prototyping to discover the “wholeness” of the problem, its entire taxonomy, and support the team to develop the best approach to creating solutions.

Capacity

Because our challenges are as complex and alive as we are, they resist off-the-shelf solutions. There are no ready-made answers to complex challenges; instead, real solutions have to be developed, co-created — forged in the heat of the context with the people who own the problem. Outside experts can support, but only the problem-owners can actually change the situation.

To navigate the enormous challenges and the accompanying uncertainty that comes with all creative work (and it IS creative work!), we help leaders and teams build the personal and leadership capacities they need to go the distance. Communication, collaboration, creativity, and other community-building, action-oriented disciplines can make the difference between good intentions and real results. In addition to consulting with teams directly, Magenta offers a variety of custom in-person and online training programs to help teams grow the capacities they need.

Execution

We all have our own ways of getting things done, and because positive change projects are often staffed by diverse teams, execution isn’t always straightforward. In our experience, each team has to develop its own culture and methods — and we bring powerful, flexible tools to support this adaptive work.

We can bring agile methods, checklists, collaboration technology, design thinking, prototyping, and many other management and execution practices that support tangible progress day after day.