Hi, my name is Brooke Struck.
I’m the Founder & Principal Facilitator at Converge.
This page is about how my personal journey led to the creation of Converge, and how it’s evolved in the years since.
If you’re looking for details about our facilitation or keynote offerings, our differentiation, or my work history, check out those pages.
But here, we’re going to dive into why Converge exists and what we aim to do.
A PROBLEM FOR EVERY SOLUTION
Throughout my career, I’ve often asked: “That’s interesting—how come you’re doing it that way?”
Most times, the non-answer was: “That’s just the way things are done around here.”
And that was that. End of conversation.
But those conversations weren’t the only things going nowhere: people weren’t game to talk about how we work, but they also weren’t happy with the results they were getting.
For example, people would get all excited about a solution, and head off to the races to implement some shiny new thing. Only the time, effort, and resources invested in it didn’t lead to better outcomes.
Their recurring frustration led me to question not just the solutions, but the way we were approaching problems in the first place.
THE SPACE FOR CONVERSATION
And that led me to strategy: a place where “the way things are done” is up for debate.
But I had a problem.
By this time in my career, I was working inside organizations who delivered those solutions that weren’t getting to the heart of clients’ challenges.
This left little room for the strategic conversations I wanted to contribute to: the clients had already done so much internal maneuvering to get the green light for the project, and the consultants didn’t want the potential project opportunity to go up in thin air.
In brief, I needed to be helping clients to frame problems rather than just to deliver solutions.
That’s why I founded Converge:
To create a brand known for asking questions that cut through noise, bringing together the right people to answer them, providing the structures & supports needed to answer those questions, and using those conversations to drive action.
Together.
FROM STRATEGY TO TRANSFORMATION
The initial offering of Converge was just that: strategy facilitation, working with client leadership teams. Over time, though, two experiences in my early strategy work led me to evolve the offering.
First, many leaders came asking for a strategy, but they didn’t actually want to change anything. That was strange to me. Why tinker with something (or completely overhaul it) if you’re happy with how it’s working?
This made me realize how much my approach to strategy is geared towards transformation: strategizing as a lever to change how we work and the outcomes we achieve.
Second, clients told me how much our strategy work together had changed the culture within their leadership team, that they’d never collaborated so effectively before.
This made me realize that strategy-crafting is a powerful tool for cultural intervention, changing the habits and lived experience of working inside an organization.
And so Converge pivoted—from strategy, to strategic and cultural transformation—and always with the same goal of achieving the impacts we want for organizations, their people, and their clients & partners.
