ABOUT

Build your capacity so you can deepen your impact.

The Olson Group is an independent collective of passionate agile pros, nonprofit experts, teachers, and consultants who come together to lead mission-driven organizations in building culture, strategy, and practices for sustainable growth and social change.

We:

Transform people, cultures, and organizations with a human-centered approach to strategy + evaluation.

Develop and facilitate powerful experiences for leaders and their teams to align, co-create strategy, and do better work, together.

Connect your values and ideas to the practices that make them a functional, day-to-day reality.

 

FROM BRANDI OLSON, CEO:

“My goal for the leaders and teams that we work with is for them to become true learning entities.

To me and my team, this means an ongoing, functional commitment to learn about learning, to constantly improve, to deliver value quickly, and to apply knowledge effectively. When we choose a project, we look for leaders who are deeply committed to thriving in times of change, empowering their teams for effective decision-making, and who want nothing more than to run on the power of happy people who want to change the world.

We are people-centered and data-informed.

We design and plan everything around the people at the center of your work–you, your employees, your customers, your stakeholders. We don’t make assumptions about what matters most to them, their values, and what they need.

Instead, we examine, measure and break down complexities into real, actionable data. We then use that data as a tool to help validate new ideas and assumptions, so we can learn and improve every step of the way.

Our sweet spot is the intersection of people + data.”

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We are agile, and our projects are too.

That means drawing from a variety of methods and industries to pull out the best of what is going to work for your organization. No cookie cutter approaches or standard formats. The most innovative work happens when processes and tools work for people, not the other way around. Only then can the processes and tools move you forward.

STRATEGIC SPRINTS
We work in sprints: design sprints, strategy sprints, evaluation sprints. The sooner we get to the heart of the work, the sooner we can test the ideas, validate our assumptions, learn from experience, and adapt.
COLLABORATIVE INSIGHT
We believe that you have the expertise, experience, and insight to solve your toughest problems and come up with brilliant ideas. We’ll help you draw it out.
PURPOSEFUL PRIORITIES
We’ll keep the big picture or strategic priority front and center, but we’ll be flexible in what we do to achieve it.
FRESH EYES
We approach each project with fresh eyes and an open mind. We won’t pretend that you’ll be able to predict everything you’ll need from this project at the beginning. And we won’t pretend that we know it all, either.
METHODICAL INQUIRY
Our method:

Discovery: Where are you at now?

Align Vision: What does success look like?

Design Strategy: What are the priorities?

Do: What will we do?

Measure: What are we learning?

Learn and Adapt: What will we do now?

FEEDBACK LOOPS
We’ll create ongoing feedback loops with you and your stakeholders sowe always know when it’s time to pivot and adjust our work.

Agile business practices are not just another shiny new thing.

At the core, it’s simply about being clear on what success looks like and experimental about how to achieve it so that people can do their best work, together. Agile means truly embracing reality while learning how to thrive in times of complexity, change, and ever-present resource shortfalls.

WE BELIEVE...

…in being transparent about everything.

…that our most important goal is to advance your mission.

…in being solution and tool-agnostic, so we can help you determine the right tools for your job, without bias or prejudgment.

…that changing mindsets and behaviors begins with learning, and we are experts in teaching mission-driven organizations and the people within them how to learn effectively for organizational change.

 

Change IS hard, but helping your team to embrace it is fundamentally the only way to get better at working together toward common goals.

 

Let's Begin