100+ Workshops.
Four Sectors.

Situation

NESDIS — the National Environmental Satellite, Data, and Information Service — is the 700-person, $3-billion federal agency inside NOAA responsible for operating the nation's weather satellites. As its head Dr. Steve Volz had written in NESDIS's own strategic plan, the agency was actively preparing for a new paradigm: incorporating innovative approaches, pursuing emerging partnerships, and adapting to a rapidly changing technology landscape. By September 2021, with the Biden administration proposing a record $6.9 billion NOAA budget and the IPCC issuing alarm-bell climate reports, the window for transformation had never been larger — and the pressure to act had never been higher.

Complication

That strategic plan had been written in 2016. Five years later, nothing had changed. NESDIS was still an organization of scientists and engineers working in their own silos, polishing their own hardware, with little incentive to think about the impact of their work on end users or colleagues. Decisions got pushed up to Volz because no one wanted to be held accountable. New priorities were added constantly while nothing was ever stopped. The culture had a name for the roughly 25% of staff who actively resisted change: "pirates." They weren't the majority, but they were a drag on the 50% of the workforce still undecided on whether NESDIS could actually change.

What They Tried — and Why It Wasn't Enough

NESDIS had not been passive. By the time MMG was engaged, the agency had already produced four different sets of governance guidelines since 2018, brought in McKinsey and other outside consultants, and issued new directives from the top. None of it stuck. The pattern was consistent: decisions were made at the top, communicated downward, and then quietly ignored — not out of malice, but because the people expected to change their behavior had no ownership of the decisions and no stake in the outcome. The consultants had diagnosed the problem correctly. What they couldn't do was create the internal mandate to act on it.

Question

NESDIS had been trying to transform itself for years — producing strategy documents, hiring consultants, and issuing new directives — with nothing to show for it. The challenge was not a shortage of ideas or ambition. It was that the people who would have to change their behavior had never been the ones building the plan.

Answer

MMG convened a deliberately non-senior participant group of 24 people on September 27, 28, and 30, 2021: stars and change agents from across NESDIS and NOAA, chosen because they wanted to be part of the solution — not the senior leaders who had repeatedly failed to follow through. Dr. Volz participated as the sole Critic, a role designed to give him visibility into the recommendations without dominating the process. The workshop was structured across six topics — Value Proposition, Innovation, Prioritization, Whole System View, Workforce Transformation, and Partnerships — so that the 18 recommendations would form a coherent transformation system. Critically, those recommendations were designed as direct input to NESDIS's Fall Strategy Meeting — a 5-day gathering of 50 senior leaders — giving them organizational weight that a standalone workshop rarely achieves.

Output

Volz and his leadership team left the workshop with three things that years of consulting engagements had failed to produce:

• An honest internal diagnosis — a candid account of why NESDIS kept failing to change, surfaced by the people living the dysfunction: deference to leadership, the inability to stop anything, a speak-up culture that didn't exist, and a workforce that had learned that innovation was punished rather than rewarded.
• An 18-recommendation transformation strategy — organized into three clusters: clarify what NESDIS uniquely does and should prioritize; build a culture of innovation, flexibility, and accountability; and develop a workforce and partner network capable of executing the vision.
• A follow-on mandate — the recommendations were adopted as the framework for the Fall Strategy Meeting, with Volz and his team committed to presenting them to 50 senior leaders and beginning implementation immediately.

Situation

NESDIS operates the nation's most sophisticated weather satellites — including the GOES-R series and the Joint Polar Satellite System — uniquely capable of detecting and characterizing wildfires from ignition through smoke dispersal. Congress and the White House had taken notice: the Bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act committed an extra $100 million to NOAA for fire capabilities, and the FY22 Disaster Relief Supplemental Act added another $20 million. The 2021 fire season had been one of the most destructive in US history. As NESDIS Fire Program Manager Mike Pavolonis put it: there is no higher priority for NESDIS than fire. The White House and Congress are telling us to just do it.

Complication

NESDIS wasn't ready to just do it. The workshop took place in late March 2022 — weeks before the 2022 fire season was set to begin. Fire detection products from GOES-R and JPSS had been developed through entirely separate acquisition programs, using different algorithms developed by different science leads, with requirements written a decade before satellite launch and no mechanism to update them based on user feedback. The result was product inconsistency, duplication, and — in some cases — algorithms that generated so many false positives that frontline fire managers had stopped using them. $120 million in new federal money was now sitting on the table, with the fire season approaching, and no integrated system or accountable team to spend it well.

What They Tried — and Why It Wasn't Enough

The fire product problem was not new, and NESDIS had not ignored it. Program managers had attempted to coordinate between the GOES-R and JPSS science teams. There had been internal working groups, planning meetings, and strategy documents. But the agency's siloed acquisition structure worked against every attempt at integration: each satellite program had its own funding line, its own science leads, and its own incentives — none of which pointed toward collaboration. What was missing was 26 of the agency's best fire-domain minds — including the external users whose frustrations had never been heard inside a NESDIS meeting room — working the problem together with a shared mandate.

Question

NESDIS had $120 million in new federal funding, a fast-approaching fire season, and satellite capabilities that no other agency could match — but no integrated system, no accountable team, and a siloed culture that had repeatedly agreed on priorities and then failed to act on them.

Answer

MMG convened 26 participants over three days via Zoom and MURAL on March 29–31, 2022: scientists, engineers, program managers, and policy staff from across NESDIS, two National Weather Service physical scientists, an NOAA research director, an EPA director, an IT specialist from NOAA's Office of the Chief Information Officer, and a senior lead from The Aerospace Corporation. Six topics — Impact Mindset, Whole Customer View, Transformation, How We Work, Communication, and Governance — were designed so that the fire challenge would be solved from every angle simultaneously.

Output

NESDIS leadership left with unanimous support from all 26 participants and three things the $120 million in new federal funding had not automatically provided:

• A unified fire system playbook — anchored by the empowerment of Mike Pavolonis as Fire Program Manager with a dedicated tiger team, clarified roles and responsibilities across the NOAA enterprise, and a plan to integrate the fire information system into the NESDIS cloud and project portfolio management framework.
• A community of practice and co-development model — bringing fire-domain power users, including NWS field forecasters, EPA partners, and commercial operators, into the product development cycle as co-developers, closing the feedback loop that had allowed ineffective algorithms to persist for years.
• A test-and-learn execution strategy — a DevOps campaign to rapidly deploy improved capabilities for the 2022 fire season and a proving ground model for fire and smoke innovation. The Next Generation Fire System achieved 90% voluntary adoption across NWS Weather Forecast Offices by early 2025, with detection down to a quarter-acre and alert times as fast as one minute.

Situation

Eisai Canada is the Canadian subsidiary of the Japanese pharmaceutical company that developed Leqembi, the first anti-amyloid therapy approved to slow the progression of early Alzheimer's disease — the first therapy to demonstrably slow cognitive decline rather than merely manage symptoms. But Leqembi is not a pill. It is an intravenous infusion that requires serial MRI monitoring before and throughout treatment to detect a potentially serious side effect called ARIA. Without timely access to MRI, eligible patients cannot start treatment, and those already on it cannot safely continue.

Complication

Canada's MRI system was already at capacity before Leqembi arrived. Wait times for non-urgent MRI ranged from months to over a year in most provinces, driven by workforce shortages, outdated equipment, scheduling inefficiencies, and a funding model that had not kept pace with clinical demand. Leqembi would require multiple MRIs per patient per year — a volume the existing system had no plan to absorb, and no national protocol to manage. Patients with mild cognitive impairment had a narrow treatment window. Delay the MRI, miss the window. Eisai could not build MRI capacity, hire radiologists, or change provincial funding policy. Like Biogen before it, the company needed a coalition of system actors to solve a problem none of them could solve alone.

What They Tried — and Why It Wasn't Enough

The conventional response to a system readiness problem of this kind is to commission research, engage key opinion leaders individually, and brief health system stakeholders through one-on-one meetings or small advisory panels. Eisai had pursued these channels. They understood the problem technically. What they lacked was a shared diagnosis built by the people managing the MRI system on the ground — radiologists, MRI technologists, neurologists, health administrators, and provincial policy actors who each saw a different slice of the access failure and had never been asked to solve it as an integrated system.

Question

Eisai needed Canada's MRI system to absorb a significant new volume of scans for Alzheimer's patients — but couldn't build capacity, hire radiologists, or change provincial funding policy on its own. The radiologists, neurologists, health administrators, and policy experts who together controlled the bottlenecks had never been asked to solve the access problem as a single, integrated system.

Answer

MMG convened 28 participants over three days via Zoom and MURAL in October 2023: Eisai internal staff, neurologists, radiologists, MRI technologists, patient advocates, health system administrators, and policy experts. Six topics — Burning Platform, Workforce, Prioritization and Guidelines, Funding, Technology and Process Improvement, and Policy and Advocacy — ensured that the recommendations would address the full pipeline of MRI access barriers simultaneously rather than in isolation.

Output

Eisai Canada left the workshop with three things it could not have produced through internal planning alone:

• A system-wide diagnosis of MRI access failure — a candid, granular account of where the pipeline actually breaks down, built by the clinicians and administrators managing it daily: workforce bottlenecks, scheduling practices that deprioritize outpatient neurology, equipment utilization gaps, and the absence of any national guideline for Alzheimer's-related MRI monitoring.
• 19 prioritized recommendations — spanning immediate clinical guideline development; workforce strategies to expand MRI technologist capacity; funding advocacy to provincial governments and hospital systems; and technology and process improvements to increase throughput without adding machines or staff.
• A cross-sector coalition with a shared mandate — 28 participants from neurology, radiology, patient advocacy, and health administration who had built the strategy together and left with shared ownership of its execution, giving Eisai a network of credible, committed partners to carry the recommendations into health systems and policy channels where a pharma company cannot go alone.

Situation

Head Injury Rehabilitation Ontario (HIRO) is a provincial non-profit that directly delivers evidence-based rehabilitation services for adults with moderate to severe acquired brain injuries across Ontario. Through independent living skills training, behavioural therapy, nursing, and other regulated health services, HIRO supports clients to maximize quality of life and community participation following injury. With approximately 45,000 new ABI cases annually in Ontario, demand for these services is both significant and growing. HIRO's clients — many living in group settings — are among the most vulnerable to COVID-19: cognitively impaired, dependent on in-person care, and unable to manage a pandemic on their own.

Complication

When the workshop convened on June 8–9, 2020, Ontario was three months into the pandemic with no vaccine, no clear timeline, and no playbook for what came next. Lockdowns had partially dismantled HIRO's community-based care model — the very thing that made rehabilitation possible — and replaced it with virtual delivery that wasn't designed for this population. Frontline staff were managing high-needs clients under pandemic constraints while burning out at a rate that threatened the organization's ability to function. And underneath all of it was a mission drift that nobody had explicitly chosen: HIRO had quietly become a custodial organization — keeping people safe, doing cleaning, managing logistics — rather than the rehabilitation agency it was built to be. As one staff member put it: "Custodial work isn't our mission. Rehab is."

What They Tried — and Why It Wasn't Enough

HIRO's leadership had been working through operational challenges week by week — managing PPE supply chains, adjusting care protocols, troubleshooting virtual delivery, and trying to maintain staff morale under relentless pressure. But that continuous response was itself part of the problem. As one staff member put it: "It feels like we're always going in 10th gear. It would be nice to drop down a gear or two — not coast, but just catch our breath." The organization had become so consumed with managing immediate crises that it had drifted from its core mission without ever making that trade-off explicitly. What HIRO needed was not more operational management from the top, but a structured moment for leadership and frontline staff to step back together.

Question

HIRO had been operating in sustained crisis mode, managing workforce strain, service delivery disruption, and strategic drift simultaneously — and doing it reactively, one problem at a time. The challenge was to step back from continuous firefighting long enough to build a coherent, organization-wide plan that leadership and frontline staff could own and execute together.

Answer

MMG convened 22 HIRO staff — from the CEO to frontline workers — via Zoom on June 8–9, 2020. Rather than organizing the challenge around functions or departments, the workshop was structured around four pandemic scenarios: problem solved imminently, problem solved eventually, problems escalate, and something else entirely. This scenario-based design forced the team to build a strategy that would hold up regardless of what happened next — critical for an organization with no way of knowing whether it was three months or three years from a return to normal.

Output

HIRO left the workshop with three things that sustained crisis management had not produced:

• A clear operational diagnosis — a candid, organization-wide view of where delivery was breaking down: workforce strain and retention risk, mission drift toward custodial care, the mismatch between virtual delivery models and client needs, and the cost of running an organization at permanent Level 10.
• An integrated action plan across four scenarios — ten prioritized commitments spanning workforce stabilization and burnout management; evolution of the care model back toward rehabilitation; client and family education; and a commitment to shape HIRO's own future before the government did it for them.
• Alignment on execution — a leadership team and frontline staff who had worked through the trade-offs together, giving the organization the shared ownership it needed to act consistently under uncertainty.

Situation

When Biogen Canada needed to move a fragmented, underprepared healthcare system toward readiness for the first-ever disease-modifying Alzheimer's therapy, they faced two problems simultaneously: a structural one and a logistical one. The structural problem was that no single actor controlled the solution — neurologists, patient advocates, health administrators, and provincial policy actors each held a piece of it, and they'd never been asked to solve it together. The logistical problem was that it was November 2020. Bringing 27 people into a room wasn't an option. Making 27 people do meaningful collaborative work online — not just listen, but actually build something together — was a different kind of challenge altogether.

Complication

The Canadian healthcare system was completely unprepared — and the timing could not have been worse. The workshop took place in November 2020, eight months into a pandemic that was actively making everything harder: dementia care was being deferred across the country, memory clinics had shifted to virtual models that weren't designed for this population, and governments at every level were consumed with COVID-19 response. Layered on top of that was a structural problem that predated the pandemic entirely: no standardized diagnostic pathway, no sufficient PET or MRI imaging capacity, and deep stigma around dementia that suppressed early help-seeking even in normal times. Biogen could not mandate any of this to change. It is a pharma company — it cannot force provinces to fund PET scans, compel physicians to adopt new protocols, or direct patient advocacy groups to shift their priorities. And yet neurologists, patient advocates, homecare providers, health administrators, and provincial policy actors would all need to move, together, in the same direction. They had never been in the same room.

What They Tried — and Why It Wasn't Enough

The conventional pharma playbook for situations like this is the advisory board: invite a handful of experts, brief them on the therapy, gather their input, and synthesize the feedback internally. Biogen had done this. The team had also commissioned a significant body of research on Canada's readiness for Alzheimer's DMTs. They understood the problem in detail. But data and advisory input pointed to the same ceiling. Advisory boards put a pharma company at the centre, asking external stakeholders to react to the company's framing, one at a time, in separate conversations. They generate opinions, not ownership. They produce a report, not a coalition.

Question

Biogen needed to know how to move a fragmented, underprepared Canadian healthcare system toward readiness for a new class of Alzheimer's therapies — in the middle of a pandemic, without the authority to mandate any of it. The neurologists, patient advocates, health administrators, and provincial policy actors who each held a piece of the solution had never been asked to solve the problem together.

Answer

MMG convened 27 participants over three days via Zoom and MURAL on November 12–14, 2020: 9 internal Biogen participants and 18 external stakeholders including neurologists, Alzheimer Society representatives, a homecare provider, a healthcare consultant, a former Ontario Health CEO, and one patient. Six topics — Awareness, Activation and Screening; Referral and Diagnosis; Treatment; Patient Experience; Burning Platform; and COVID and Other Scenarios — were designed to surface the full system's barriers simultaneously, so that the recommendations would fit together as a coherent strategy rather than a series of unconnected asks.

MMG designed the three-day engagement specifically for distributed collaboration — using Zoom breakout rooms for structured small-group work and MURAL to replicate the synthesis process that would normally happen around a physical wall: clustering ideas, surfacing patterns, building toward shared conclusions. The format was new; the rigor was not.

Output

Biogen Canada left the workshop with three things a pharma company cannot buy or commission:

• A candid system diagnosis — a shared, ground-level account of where the Alzheimer's diagnostic and care pathway actually breaks down, surfaced by the clinicians, advocates, and administrators living those breakdowns rather than inferred from secondary research.
• A cross-sector action plan — 18 integrated action items spanning awareness and stigma reduction; referral and diagnostic pathway improvement; treatment readiness; and patient and caregiver experience, built by the people who would have to execute each part.
• A coalition ready to engage — 18 external stakeholders who had stress-tested the strategy together, endorsed its recommendations, and left with a shared understanding of the problem that no advisory board process could have produced — giving Biogen a network of informed, aligned partners rather than a roster of separately-briefed contacts.

Situation

NOAA Fisheries' Office of Science and Technology (OST) and Office of the Chief Information Officer (OCIO) are designed to function as an integrated engine — OST providing scientific expertise, OCIO providing the technology infrastructure, together delivering solutions to the fisheries scientists, marine ecologists, and enforcement officers who depend on them. The stakes had never been higher: climate change was accelerating the pace at which marine ecosystems were changing, AI and machine learning were transforming what was possible in fisheries science, and a $3.3 billion Inflation Reduction Act investment had raised expectations and shortened the clock on modernization.

Complication

In practice, OST and OCIO gave users conflicting platform advice, took too long to align, defaulted to familiar contractors over better alternatives, and resisted emerging tools like AI and machine learning. Scientists with PhD-honed DIY instincts had simply stopped asking for help and started building their own workarounds. As one staff member described it: "It sometimes feels like we're bobbing along in our own individual life rafts, when we should be sailing together in the same boat." The IRA investment made the dysfunction impossible to ignore: here was a once-in-a-generation opportunity to modernize, and the two offices that were supposed to deliver it couldn't agree on how to work together.

What They Tried — and Why It Wasn't Enough

Howell and Majower had attempted bilateral leadership meetings, internal working groups, and direct conversations about alignment. The problem was structural: the two offices had different cultures, different incentive systems, and a long institutional history of operating independently. Every attempt at coordination ran into the same friction — the people who needed to change their behavior weren't the ones setting the agenda, and the scientists whose frustration was driving the urgency were not in the room when integration was being discussed.

Question

OST and OCIO were supposed to function as an integrated engine, but years of cultural separation, misaligned incentives, and failed coordination attempts had left scientists building their own workarounds rather than asking for help. The challenge was to finally close that gap in a way that stuck — not by issuing new directives from the top, but by getting the right people working the problem together for the first time.

Answer

MMG convened 31 participants over three days in Silver Spring, Maryland in March 2024: 12 from OST, 6 from OCIO, 6 scientists from the regional fisheries science centers whose frustration was driving the urgency, and 7 NOAA Fisheries partners including representatives from NESDIS and OAR. Six interconnected topics — Change Management, Future Mindset, Leadership, Unified Operating Model, User Focus, and Workforce and Partnerships — ensured that the recommendations would form a coherent transformation system, not a list of unrelated fixes.

Output

OST and OCIO leadership left with 92% of participants supporting the recommendations, and three things that years of internal effort had failed to produce:

• Clarity on why previous attempts had stalled — a shared, candid diagnosis of the cultural, structural, and workforce barriers preventing OST and OCIO from functioning as a unified operation, surfaced by the people living the problem rather than commissioned from an outside consultant.
• A confident action plan — 18 integrated commitments spanning change management strategies; a shared vision and North Star; leadership accountability structures and a guiding coalition; a redesigned operating model; user-centric service principles; and a workforce and partnership strategy to build the skills and contractor relationships the vision requires.
• A coalition ready to act — 31 participants from OST, OCIO, the regional science centers, and partner offices who had stress-tested the strategy together and left with shared ownership of its execution, with a follow-on session committed to assign owners, timelines, and roadblock analysis to each recommendation.

Situation

Cymax Group is a Vancouver-based eCommerce enablement company that had spent 15 years building, losing money on, and learning from direct-to-consumer furniture eCommerce — and had emerged from that education with a unique set of capabilities: a proprietary pricing engine, deep marketplace relationships with Target, Walmart, and Google, a freight brokerage platform called Freight Club, a channel management service, and a data and merchandising operation. Freight Club alone had grown from 300 shipments a month to 1,000 a day with almost no marketing spend. Its CEO had set a target of $500 million in revenue. The leadership team believed they had all the pieces to get there.

Complication

The pieces weren't adding up. The company's business units — Cymax, Freight Club, Channel Gate, and a nascent marketplace operation — operated as separate silos with different cultures, different incentives, and no shared identity. Externally, vendors and partners couldn't articulate what Cymax Group actually was. Internally, 80% of revenue came from 20% of customers, but 80% of the work went to the bottom 20%. A deeper strategic question had never been resolved: the company's marketplace business was heavily dependent on Amazon, but the leadership team hadn't agreed on whether to continue down that path or shift toward owning the customer relationship directly — a choice with direct implications for exit valuation.

What They Tried — and Why It Wasn't Enough

Individual business unit heads had developed their own growth plans, and the CEO had set clear financial targets. But those plans had been built in isolation — each unit optimizing for its own metrics, with no shared framework for deciding which bets were worth making, which customers were worth keeping, or what kind of company Cymax Group was trying to become. A previous company off-site had included 50 people and produced no lasting decisions. The hard choices kept getting deferred — not because the leadership team lacked intelligence or ambition, but because they were running too fast to step back.

Question

Cymax had the capabilities, the market position, and a credible path to $500 million in revenue — but four business units pulling in different directions, no shared identity, and a leadership team too deep in day-to-day operations to make the hard strategic choices the goal required.

Answer

MMG structured the challenge across four interconnected topics — Who We Are, Purpose, Hyper-Growth Opportunities, and People, Leadership and Culture — ensuring that identity decisions would inform growth decisions, and that both would be grounded in the leadership capacity required to execute. Owners were assigned to each major initiative during the workshop itself, making accountability a feature of the output rather than an afterthought.

Output

The Cymax leadership team left with three things their day-to-day operations had never forced them to produce:

• A shared identity and purpose — a resolved definition of what Cymax Group is (an eCommerce enablement company that makes it easy to win online), which business units fit under that identity, and how to communicate it consistently to vendors, carriers, employees, and potential acquirers or investors.
• A prioritized growth agenda with owners — a set of concrete hyper-growth bets — including a B2B commercial marketplace, private label, Freight Club expansion, and data monetization — each with a named owner and a clear connection to the $500M goal and exit value strategy.
• A people and culture blueprint — a prioritized EMT hiring plan, a professional development framework, a clearer definition of what a great Cymax employee looks like, and a commitment to the disciplined performance management the organization had previously avoided.