For 22 years, Sightlines Group has been a trusted advisor to organizations engaged in purpose-driven work and systems change.
We work closely with a limited number of clients at a time, typically over several years, to help them build a foundation of skills and workplace culture, plus software and internal processes, that broadly represent the future of work.
Our background skillsets include expert facilitation and executive coaching, and custom software development.
We work with leaders and teams that want their organizations to (1) Have a culture of care where their people know they matter, and where they come to work every day to be of service, to learn, and to belong, (2) Learn how to shift from providing expertise and/or control, to facilitating collaboration and community engagement, and (3) Develop software that allows frontline staff to track ground-level data, which can be used to evaluate program effectiveness and help leaders tell the story of the impact they are making.
Sightlines Group was founded by Chris Barber in 2001.
Some of our consulting and technology work has included helping Neighbors Helping Neighbors tackle predatory lending and financial literacy; Lumina Foundation develop a theory of change for bringing the number of college graduates in the US up to the level of other advanced nations; Women for Women International develop a nine-nation strategy for supporting women survivors of war; Credit First National Association integrate data-driven decision-making into its day-to-day operations; the states of Indiana & Kentucky improve mental health care and save millions in taxpayer dollars by helping clinicians, educators, and the justice system work together across traditional silos; and an early-stage life sciences company engage the medical community around its data and mission.
Our leadership development and coaching work includes the design and delivery of hundreds of courses to foundations and global banking and technology clients, including HSBC Bank, Hitachi Vantara, and The Cities for Financial Empowerment Fund.
What We Can't Know in Advance - Sightlines View
Because our view is inherently a systems view, one of the first themes we'll touch on is the counter-intuitive or emergent nature of the systems we humans create. Few stories drive this point home more than Stanley Milgram's efforts to understand how so many people could be complicit in the Holocaust, through his famous Obedience studies conducted at Yale in the 1960s.