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Frequently asked questions

Common questions about who we are, what we do, and what to expect when working with Mind Meeting Group.

We’re a team of strategy consultants and professional facilitators with 100+ years of combined experience helping Fortune 500s, governments, and nonprofits across three continents. Mark McCarvill founded Mind Meeting Group in 2019 after recognizing that promising strategies often fail due to lack of stakeholder alignment during development. Traditional approaches to strategy create a gap between design and execution. External consultants deliver excellent analysis but teams lack ownership for execution, while internal development improves buy-in but usually lacks the diverse perspectives and facilitation expertise needed to build robust strategies. A Mind Meeting solves both problems by combining analytical rigor with collaborative strategy development. Leaders get world-class strategy with built-in team ownership for execution at a fraction of traditional consulting time and cost.

We’re faster (we deliver in 10 weeks vs. 6+ months), more inclusive (team-based vs. top-down), and more effective (6X higher probability of successful execution). In short, our collaborative approach delivers the cross-functional alignment and organizational-wide commitment missing from traditional consulting methods.

A Mind Meeting is an intensive, professionally facilitated strategy workshop. Over three days, a large cross-functional team co-designs a strategy in response to a challenge that has been framed by leadership. Each day has a clear goal. On day one, the team analyzes issues and data relevant to the strategic challenge. On day two, the team brainstorms hundreds of alternative solutions. On day three, the team clusters and prioritizes the most promising solutions into three core elements that form the strategy. The strategy includes detailed action items and success metrics for each department. The workshop ends with clear commitment and buy-in from participants.

Advisory boards are ideal for gathering quick expert feedback on clinical data or technical topics, but they’re the wrong tool for tackling complex health system challenges. Traditional advisory boards typically give you input from just one physician specialty. This means you miss critical input from the other 90% of the system: other specialists, family physicians, nurses, technicians, and of course patients. While you could run separate advisory boards with different groups, this rarely happens in practice.


A Mind Meeting solves this problem by bringing all of these stakeholders together in one place. Beyond hearing from each group individually, participants learn from each other. This deepens everyone’s understanding of the challenge’s complexity and creates genuine co-creation of solutions rather than simply answering your questions. The result is authentic stakeholder buy-in because participants helped develop the strategy, not just input you must stitch together later.

A Mind Meeting is a strategy design and execution tool that can be applied to any complex challenge requiring a strategy. Pharmaceutical leaders use it to build stakeholder-driven strategies to understand and overcome market access barriers. Government leaders use it to overcome departmental silos, inertia, and aversion to innovation. Startup technology company leaders use it to hit hypergrowth targets. The use cases are effectively unlimited.

We work for organizations facing complex strategic challenges that require cross-functional coordination and stakeholder buy-in. Our ideal clients are leaders who share our belief that organizations have greater commercial and social impact when leaders systematically engage their people and stakeholders to co-create strategy.


For example, we’ve helped pharmaceutical companies like Biogen and Eisai make sense of complex healthcare systems and build support among health care professionals, patient groups, and policy experts for system changes to improve patient care. We’ve helped government agencies like NOAA overcome professional silos and accelerate the transition of research to operations. We’ve helped non-profits like Head Injury Rehabilitation Ontario align a diverse workforce on a strategy to prepare the organization for multiple pandemic scenarios. We’ve also helped the executive team at e-commerce startup Cymax align on a strategy to more than double profitable revenue.

You get a detailed 30-page blueprint for action that your team supports and is eager to execute. This document lays out the analysis and rationale for the 20 strategic recommendations that form the basis of your strategy. It also contains a prioritized list of actions, including quick wins to broaden organizational support and momentum. Unlike traditional consulting deliverables, a Mind Meeting strategy come with built-in champions across your organization, along with clear ownership and timelines, success metrics for tracking progress, and organizational alignment documentation.

Pharmaceutical companies use Mind Meetings to tackle market access barriers, optimize product launches, navigate regulatory challenges, and build stakeholder coalitions. The collaborative approach brings together internal teams with external stakeholders like physicians, patient advocates, payers, and policymakers to co-create strategies that address real-world implementation challenges.

Government agencies use Mind Meetings to break down silos, accelerate innovation adoption, and build cross-departmental collaboration on complex policy challenges. The structured approach helps diverse government stakeholders align on priorities while navigating political and bureaucratic constraints.

Nonprofits use Mind Meetings to build stakeholder coalitions, develop advocacy strategies, and align diverse board and community interests around strategic priorities. The collaborative approach helps nonprofits engage donors, beneficiaries, and community partners in strategy development.

There are no special educational or expertise requirements to participate in a Mind Meeting, apart from the ability to collaborate respectfully with others. There’s no need to have an MBA or a background in strategy to help build a strategy. We explain and facilitate the entire process, meaning that your team simply has to share what they know, let others share what they know, and help turn this shared knowledge into solutions.

Yes. We offer both onsite and online strategic collaboration workshops to accommodate geographically dispersed teams. Teams use Zoom breakout rooms and digital whiteboards guided by our expert facilitators to achieve the focus and engagement required. Participants regularly tell us that our online strategy workshops are the best they have ever attended.

We follow a proven 10-week methodology: weeks 1-8 involve stakeholder identification, challenge framing, and team design; week 9 is the intensive 3-day collaborative workshop where diverse teams analyze issues, brainstorm solutions, and prioritize recommendations; week 10 focuses on implementation planning and stakeholder alignment.

During the workshop, expect structured collaboration with equal participation, bias-free problem-solving, and real-time consensus building. Afterward, you’ll have 18 prioritized recommendations with 90-100% stakeholder support, clear implementation roadmaps, and organizational alignment that drives successful execution.

Yes, we offer optional follow up support to help teams focus, prioritize, and start executing the strategy with confidence. There often is a great deal of uncertainty about where to begin and we help teams overcome analysis-paralysis with a short-term implementation plan to generate some quick wins from the strategy.

Still have questions?

Every organization’s strategic challenges are unique. Connect with our team to explore how our proven framework can address your specific situation and deliver measurable results with stakeholder buy-in.