Our Work

Rather than handing you a finished report, I work alongside you, so the thinking, skills, and habits stay with your team after I leave.

Walking alongside

Most of my work is long-term accompaniment: staying with a leader or a small team over months or years as conditions shift. What that looks like depends on you. I might be:

a thinking partner and critical friend: someone firmly on your side who will also tell you honestly what they see, including when the story you’re telling yourself may be keeping you stuck
a coach as you grow into what the work is asking of you
an extra set of hands when something matters a lot, or when you’re trying something new
a mirror, helping you see clearly and come back to what you already know
someone who helps your team build a regular rhythm of pausing, reflecting, and adjusting
a connector to people, ideas, and practices from other fields to help you keep learning and spark something new

I work collaboratively, and when the work calls for it, I bring in trusted colleagues whose skills complement mine.

Where we usually begin

Accompaniment is a relationship, and we both need to know it’s a good fit. So we usually start with something shorter and focused. People often reach out when they are:

in the middle of a significant organizational or strategic change and want help making sense of it
trying to make room for learning and more complexity-aware strategy, and finding the usual tools fall short
stretched thin and struggling to see what matters most
noticing the same problems coming back, no matter what they try
wanting to learn from their work more deliberately, so it shapes what they do next
creating something new and looking for a creative thinking partner
feeling they’ve lost their spark and wanting to reconnect with their curiosity about how change happens
interested in bringing ideas from (re)Patterning Labs into their own work

What I bring

I’m a social creative and a pragmatist at heart. I’ve sat in many of the seats my clients sit in: on an executive team, leading large teams, and building influence without formal authority. I know the pressures that come with each. Twenty-five years of leading programs, strategy, research, and evaluation also taught me that new ideas only matter if they can take root in who we are together.

My strength is helping people learn their way forward when there’s no clear answer. I notice patterns: what keeps repeating in how a team works, decides, or gets stuck, and what that might be telling us. The stories we tell ourselves about a situation can trip us up or lock us in, so I help complicate and soften them to help open new paths.

I design and facilitate spaces where people can make sense of what’s happening together, treat challenges and uncertainty as chances to learn, and decide what to try next. And I help organizations build the conditions for that learning to last, through new habits, structures, and ways of working, so teams can act strategically even when the ground keeps shifting.

I take evidence seriously, and focus on making learning useful rather than a reporting exercise. I don’t take on standalone evaluation projects, but I sometimes join evaluation teams as a thought partner.

How this connects to (re)Patterning Labs

Alongside my consulting, I lead (re)Patterning Labs, a nonprofit space for exploring how the relational patterns of our lives and work together can shift. That work is exploratory and generative. My consulting is where those ideas meet real organizations, people, budgets, and timelines. They feed each other.

Why Little Stone Allies?

My family name, Kiessel or kiesel, means gravel or small stones in German. I love what small stones can do. Over time they wear holes in much larger rocks. A single one in your shoe is impossible to ignore. And when they gather, they become something greater than any one of them. I chose “allies” because the heart of my work is walking alongside you.