Our Work

We believe that the multi-disciplinary nature of the skills required to address people, groups, and communities in conflict encourages the most creative approaches to problem-solving, including:

Relationship and trust-building techniques
Processes that create a safe place for fear and emotions to be expressed
Skills that allow communication and problem-solving to proceed in a productive and collaborative atmosphere

Organizations that have retained our services over the years include:

US Congress, Office of Technology Assessment
U.S. Bureau of Land Management
Suzuki International
Office of the Administrator, US Environmental Protection Agency
National Research Council of the National Academies of Science
Save the Children
Institute for Water Resources
Bechtel Environmental
U.S. Army Corps of Engineers
U.S. Department of Energy
W.K. Kellogg Foundation
The Salzburg Seminar
The Boeing Company
Institute of American Indian Arts
Sandia National Laboratories
United World Colleges
University of Ottawa

testimonialS

Pre-COVID, Dr. Lefkoff and partners co-convened and facilitated a Complex Systems Science Gathering in Stockholm, Sweden.

"I write to express very deep gratitude for organizing the meeting in Stockholm in December, 2019. Our broad topic was The Global Economy and the Anthropocene. The group that met was open, serious, and inventive. Our discussions were very good. The facilitation of the group worked very well indeed. I have been to many scientific conferences. This was outstanding. Merci! I strongly advise that we meet again as soon as possible. We need to pursue the work, and find wide pathways of outreach. We confront a crisis that is civilization and global in scale, and existential."

- Dr. Stuart Kauffman, Emeritus Professor of Biochemistry at the University of Pennsylvania and Affiliate Faculty at the Institute for Systems Biology. MacArthur Fellow and Wiener Medal recipient

“Stockholm, and Sweden more generally, have become something of a vortex for climate change. Your meeting has crossed immense conceptual areas from politics to economics to industry. You can imagine how difficult it would be to do that in the US. I don’t know for certain how international relationships work in Sweden, but if your meeting is any indication, high-level contacts are not a problem. After seeing the (non)results from COP25 in Madrid, I think that what happened in Stockholm may be even more important than I would have guessed.”

- Dr. Gary Metcalf, President International Federation for Systems Research

"A meeting in Stockholm brought together nine leading international specialists in complexity science with local experts and practitioners to launch an exploration of the catastrophic risks of collapse in the present global society faced by the climate and biodiversity crises and a materialistic economy out of control. The aim was to try to find ways forward towards the adjacent possible that might provide hope for the future.

The linear path of strategic thinking is not working. Solving the climate change problem requires imagination and deep humility. At this gathering, a number of key questions were raised. How do we deal with an economy that is out of control? What do we need to unlearn? What rules do we need to live in peace with ourselves and the world? Living systems are self-regulating. What would nature do? How do we learn from nature and work for the recovery of the Earth? What new conception of ethics and morality can be grounded in complexity theory? What new narrative do we need to communicate to bring change? How do we influence people and get them to stop believing that they are powerless? How do we co-create the future?”

- Dr. Arthur Dahl, Coordinator UN Systemwide Earthwatch, United Nations Environment Program