Tilt: Change-able Performance

Change is unavoidable and necessary. Individuals’ inner agility determines our collective ability to tackle pressing workforce challenges: interpersonal communication, critical thinking, growth-mindsets, operationalizing diversity. Today’s workforce doesn’t possess skills to confront evolving contexts and the accompanying uncertainty, and employers aren’t equipped with training solutions to meet this foundational need.

Tilt’s avant-garde approach to executive training – originated as an experiment at MIT Sloan – is immersive, interactive, and based in the science of creativity. A virtual 12-week program will train participants to establish collaborative conditions and self-corrective practices, build feedback loops, harness and leverage difference, and develop adaptive cycles. 

Tested with mid-level Fortune500 leaders and early-stage founders through VC accelerators, this proposed pilot will enable a diverse cohort, otherwise without access, to develop the skills to lead their employees and communities to thrive in uncertainty. The success of this program will position a movement that radiates people’s capacity to evolve.

The global market is undergoing rapid change. New technologies, continuous streams of information, political shifts, and COVID19, are disrupting traditional workloads, skills, and organizational structures. A workforce that, for decades, has been trained to adopt “best practices” faces a paralyzing level of uncertainty, without the skills to evolve and thrive. New and tenured employees alike are without the agency, the economic and educational bandwidth, to ideate how to remain relevant in the market and respond creatively to new opportunities.

Mid-level managers and community leaders are positioned to support their employees and peers in navigating this uncertainty, but traditional education and mindsets have not prepared them to lead through this challenge. If they continue to copy & paste their leadership in the post-moden context, their teams – new entrants to the workforce and those reemerging from the COVID19 pandemic – will not be equipped to succeed. And their individual reticence to change will further hinder their colleagues, clients, and communities: the systems they serve.

Tilt recognizes this urgency, and has designed its experiential learning programs with these challenges at their core.

Tilt understands how human learning works, and what obstructs it, enabling us to deliver our core commitment: to help people accelerate their ability to change in meaningful and permanent ways.

Typical leadership training concentrates on delivering great content.
Tilt’s approach prioritizes creating great learners – because the capacity to adopt and adapt new ideas ensures that the content will achieve its goals. 

Typical leadership training is two-stepped: frameworks then implementation.
Tilt’s “making to think” approach begins with immersion into the desired practices in a different context, and addresses individual success and resistance to new concepts in real time. Frameworks are introduced once the accompanying skills have been internalized. The art of translating those experiences into an individual’s business context is the core learning of change-ability.

Our training journey:

• Experience – multiple modes of learning, based in the arts, isolate and simulate the targeted behaviors in a low-risk environment

• Self-corrective practices – individually reflect on learning edges within the shared experience

• Experimentation – hands-on practice approaching edges in new ways

• Framework – collectively arrive at a framework that is internalized and tested, substantiated with science and research

• Implementation – practical and accountable ways of integrating learning into daily work

We will serve managers of Fortune 1000 companies, mid-level leaders who are otherwise without access to this type of emerging training, and can model change in their organizations and design cultures and practices that enable their employees to grow. In 2020 these companies employed 34,616,000 people. Our near-term goal is to reach 1% of these companies, supporting the change-ability of more than 350,000 employees. 

Since 2015 Tilt has embedded within these organizations – through progressive programs at MIT Sloan, Harvard, Stanford and within corporate training and VC accelerators – to learn their history, collaborate to identify the sources of challenges, and deliver transformative training. If awarded a Solve prize we will enlist our alumni to weigh in on the design and evaluation of our scaling program, and to support the new cohort in their transformation journey.

Over the next decade we intend to partner with hundreds of organizations that share a commitment to individual leadership, transformation, diversity, and inclusion. We will model the skills, practices, and mindsets that produce agile and innovative leaders and cultures. Ultimately, these leaders, their employees, and their organizations will model and radiate the capacity to change to the millions of people they serve.

Our solution addresses two realities laid out by the Challenge: that American workers are facing unparalleled instability and change in the nature of work, and that employers will need to continually support them in skill-building for  “what to do” and “how to be” to survive and thrive in the workforce.

At Tilt, we are experts at change – we study it, we assess it, we design it, and we are practitioners ourselves. We have architected an immersive training journey that can be adapted to any industry, business, or job function, and that breaks down and instills the ability to change.

2 Part Time
2 Contractors

1 Full Time
Aithan Shapira(MFA-PhD) artist, Lecturer MIT, Founder Tilt - culture design and transformation firm focused on change-ability. As facilitator/coach, draws on 20+ years of transforming creative process into cultural practice with global organizations including NASA, Google, Roche. Aithan serves McKinsey’s think tank for Innovation Learning and has pioneered progressive curricula in leadership and skills retraining for the future of work at MIT, Harvard, Stanford, and Berklee. Aithan researched the creative process at Royal College of Art, lived in Australian Aboriginal community to study art and survival, and remains a visiting critic at arts institutions internationally. 

Within our organization and with the individuals and organizations we serve, we train to build a culture of candor and feedback loops that will enable the psychological safety necessary to operationalize diversity – of people, perspectives, processes, and skills.

The team at Tilt are practitioners of these concepts, we work in the ways we teach. We experience that difference drives creativity. Our unease with conflict, and often premature resolution, limits our ability to leverage perspectives that diversity provides for innovation and growth. There is an art to curating organizational (and individual) cultural practices that contain a healthy dose of differentiation. 

Our training journeys focus on increasing capacity to work with the discomfort of holding competing points of view simultaneously, and the practice of listening by dropping personal perspective in order to fully engage with another. These are bridge skills that enable high-performing cultures to reap the benefits of creative tension.

Experiential immersion
Curated, facilitated experiences that shift perspective, provoke insight, and become peer-group touchstones for learning and development. Orchestras, jazz trios, dance troupes, improv teams, museum tours, creative visual arts, nature and environment. 

Transformative facilitation
Mastery in guiding ah-ha’s to become commitments, behaviors, and practices that produce new ways of being.

Developmental coaching
Individualized learning that prioritizes the next learning edge, uncovers obstacles to change and offers steady feedback with accountability.

Meaningful application
Repeated cycles of seeing-understanding-doing are what accelerate human learning. Applications are designed to reflect the meaningful organizational and business challenges of tomorrow.

Peer group community
Tightly woven relationships are the web that supports performance, learning, collaboration, and change.

Our technology is that which makes us uniquely human, our ability to change. Though, over the past five years, we have successfullly delivered immersive trainings on a number of virtual platforms.

Not applicable.

Uncertainty is what separates leadership from management. It is during uncertain times that our leadership stands out, whether we like what it looks like or not. We are constantly looking outside of ourselves for answers – asking experts, watching TED talks, consulting Google, reading blogs. We’ve forgotten how to look internally for our answers. The only thing you control is how to be – that’s where certainty lies. Understanding yourself and how you relate to those things outside of you – that’s how you begin thrive in a constantly changing world. 

At any time, and especially in uncertainty, a leader builds progress by measuring the success of a day by how closely she lives to her values.

Our greater imperative is to increase one billion people’s capacity to evolve, adapt, and thrive.  Starting in the US we intend to partner with organizations that are significantly influencing millions of lives and share a commitment to individual leadership, transformation, upskilling, diversity and inclusion. Our intention is to model together the skills, practices and mindsets that produce agile, innovative, and connected leaders and cultures. Ultimately, leaders and their organizations will be performing in a way that radiates the capacity to change – so they would influence their employees, clients, and communities:  the systems they serve.

Partnership is critical to scale, and Tilt is seeking a like-minded partner to capture more data on the impact of our process and provide the backing to allow us to scale.

We are extending requests to a variety of potential partners, including universities, multi-national corporations, and governmental bodies.

Measuring creativity - Arts-based practices have unique metrics of success that we are eager to define and capture.