Expert Facilitation for Complex Issues & Collective Wisdom

Working Together

An invitation and philosophy of practice

Every organisation is a living system - shaped by relationships, stories, and shared purpose.

My work supports people and teams to see more clearly what’s really happening beneath the surface, so they can act with greater coherence and creativity.

I do this in two complementary ways:

Participatory Design & Leadership

Bringing the right voices into the room to sense the present, and co-create the future.

Systemic Constellations

Revealing the hidden dynamics that shape behaviour and decisions.

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Participatory Design & Leadership

Real change happens when people can see themselves in the future they’re trying to create. Participatory work brings the right voices into the room - not as a tick-box exercise, but as co-designers with agency, insight, and lived experience that makes the outcome stronger.

Jamie has spent more than 20 years designing and leading participatory approaches across diverse communities, organisations, and systems. From supporting families and young people to influence climate action, to cultivating long-term community-led food growing initiatives, his work has always centred the people most connected to the challenge.

He specialises in bringing clarity to complex conversations - online, in-person and hybrid - where multiple perspectives need to be heard, respected, and integrated into decisions that stick. His approach blends practical structure with genuine curiosity, helping groups uncover what matters most and how to move forward together.

This work includes

• Designing and facilitating participatory reviews and strategy processes
• Engagement with families, communities, and young people
• Participatory research, evaluation, and learning
• Collective reflection and harvesting practices that turn experience into insight
• Training others to lead meaningful, inclusive participation

I work with a small number of clients each year, offering focused expertise through 1–1 mentoring or hands-on partnership in designing and delivering engagement processes. The common thread in all of it: people feel heard, decisions become clearer, and momentum builds where it matters.

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Systemic Constellations for organisations, networks & distributed systems

Organisations are living systems. What happens in one part affects the whole. When things feel stuck - misalignment, silos, friction between teams, or a pattern of “we keep talking about it but nothing changes” - the issue is rarely an individual. It’s the system trying to tell you something.

Systemic constellations make the invisible visible.

With almost 15 years of experience learning, training, and developing new forms of structural constellations and creative practice, I bring a steady hand and a clear eye to complex environments. I work directly with leaders and teams, and collaborate with a network of trusted practitioners for broader systemic consulting days when projects demand wider support.

In a constellation session, we map the organisation in a physical way: people stand in roles, or we use objects to represent key parts of the system - customers, teams, decisions, values, pressures, history. Suddenly, patterns that felt complicated become clear. Relationships, tensions, and blind spots emerge in ways data alone can’t show. And once the system can be seen, it can start to move.

When this approach helps

Repeated challenges no matter who is in the role
Teams working hard but not together
Leadership changes creating uncertainty or fragmentation
Strategy not landing where it needs to
Growth or restructuring causing imbalance

What clients gain

Shared clarity on what’s really happening
Insight into what the system needs to function well
A shift from blame to collective responsibility
Practical next steps people are willing to take
A sense of relief: “Ah, now we understand”

Why it works
Every organisation has a logic beneath the surface. We help you read it - not by adding more noise or complex frameworks, but by revealing the dynamics that drive behaviour, decisions, and culture. This isn’t about pointing out the problem; it’s about unlocking movement where it matters.

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Collaborators & Collective Work

No one changes a system alone. Many of the projects I take on are too complex, layered, or far-reaching for a single facilitator or consultant. In those cases, I draw on a network of trusted collaborators — practitioners in participatory design, systemic constellations, community development, research, and creative practice.

We form a temporary working collective around each project’s needs, combining perspectives to hold the work with clarity and care. Together, we design and facilitate processes that can move at the right depth and scale — always keeping relationships, learning, and integrity at the centre.

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Current Collaborators include

Moi Tu

Moi is an artist, consultant and facilitator. She helps people in workplaces and communities to collaborate – with more creativity, meaning and humanness – in the work that matters to them. Moi’s facilitation brings visual and artful dialogue methods that help to loosen the knots, hear different voices and deepen understanding of the issues at hand. With 18+ years working in social justice, health and care, she has delivered multi-disciplinary work across a range of settings – culture change, strategy and planning, engagement, business transformation, wellbeing, dot-joining, sense-making, working with complexity – and convening the hard conversations along the way.

Mark Harrod

Mark is a systemic coach and trainee psychotherapist, with experience over many years working systemically and strategically with individuals and teams at every level of organisations. With a background in executive leadership in the not-for-profit sector, Mark has also spent much of the past 10 years working with communities, local government and health systems across Devon and London to co-design the ‘social architecture’ to support the development of healthy communities and underpin the planning of community health and wellbeing Neighbourhood Hubs, including through his position as an Associate of the Bromley-by-Bow centre.

Nicola Seuren

Nicola has a background in corporate leadership within the energy and sustainability sector, supporting organisations to navigate complexity and deliver purposeful, commercially grounded change. Trained in both organisational and family systemic constellations, she brings a systems thinking and design approach to her work with senior teams - helping them see the wider dynamics influencing culture, decision-making and impact.

Working with Me

Whether through participatory design or systemic constellations, the work is always about the same thing: helping people and systems find alignment, clarity, and movement toward what matters most.

I offer a limited number of partnerships each year with organisations, networks, and teams who are ready to explore their next level of coherence and collaboration. If that’s the kind of conversation you’re looking for, let’s start there.

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Testimonials

Oliver Holtaway - Research Director at The New Citizenship Project Autism Friendly User Design

“I have been fortunate enough both to be trained by Jamie as a facilitator and also to work with him on a project that has required a great deal of creativity, lateral thinking, empathy and sensitivity. Jamie has been a fantastic partner in this, bringing a holistic viewpoint to all questions and decisions, interacting with project participants with great care, attention, generosity and vulnerability, and being eager to pilot and adopt creative and innovative tech-based facilitation techniques that have expanded our palette of experience at New Citizenship Project. It has been a pleasure to work with him and I highly recommend him as a partner.”
Inka Bartosova Pibilova - Evaluations, Facilitation, Organisational Development at evaluace.com

“I asked Jamie to co-design a pan-European bi-lingual event on Zoom for 70 to 150 participants and I am really greatful he accepted. We were well aligned on the key principles - to make it easy for participants to access, engage in and co-design the event. Jamie and his colleague have trained our hosts, interpreters and participants in QiQoChat and Zoom and provided instructions also in an on-line document and a video. They were both very flexible and responsive to any needs we had. The event was well received and helped participants and hosts show that meaningful conversations can happen even on-line. I am sure this is just a beginning! Thank you for this experience!”
Sara Huang - UNIDO Hybrid meeting

“In support of a gathering of experts, Jamie and I co-facilitated a hybrid session. In addition to his deep understanding of embodied practices, Jamie brought creative questions and embodied exercises to the experts in order to help them move from thinking to listening. It was Jamie's presence, patience, and improvisational thinking that made the gathering productive. It was his calm energy that infused life into the design. Jamie makes collaborating easy and enjoyable!”
Jose Barco, Director, CoLab International

“Jamie Colston has worked with me and for my org Community CoLab many times as a host and tech host. He has led and supported projects and he is always a pleasure to work with. Jamie is very committed, responsive, with attention to detail and solution focused. Jamie is great at thinking and planning ahead for different scenarios and able to remain calm and bring his zen spirit into the team when things fall into caos with the unexpected happening. He is very organised and also a great communicator. Jamie can handle big and complex events, he has most recently supported us at www.CoLabinternational.co.uk to deliver a series of online global conversation on a very challenging and complex topic and with simultaneous interpretation into various lenguajes and he was not just a joy to work with, he also brought in his brilliant and reassuring energy to help the team remain calm and make it look like ever was under control event when things were though. Highly recommended!
Chris Johnson, Shambala Festival Director

“Jamie supported over 75 of the Shambala festival team with or first online team event. He advised on event design and content, trained team members to co-host the event, and he and his team facilitated the meeting on the day. His ideas and technical know-how made the event exceed our expectations, with everyone actively involved during the day and feeling engaged and connected. We had overwhelmingly positive feedback. It was a great experience for us stat to finish.”
Cai Burton, Illustrator, Artist & Creative coach

“I've worked with Jamie several times now where he has facilitated team development days. Going into the day, I was confident that it would be a success because he spent the time working out the unique goals and challenges our businesses face. During the session, he brought a sense of calm confidence that allowed us to focus on the task at hand. We had a really great day with Jamie and all of the attendees came away feeling empowered - having not realised how much of a positive influence he would bring! Would definitely recommend Jamie.”
Polly Higgins, Lawyer for the Earth - Ecocide, Rest in Power

“I just want to say a HUGE thank you to you for organising such a spectacular event. That was simply the best conference/summit/event I have ever had the honour of speaking at. You made something remarkable happen; your team were great facilitators, your choice of speakers brought fantastic energy to the day and the children seemed to be completely galvanised by the chance to become empowered to find their own voices. I salute you and you team for a truly great job done!”
Natasha Collins-Daniel, Head of Communications at Centre for sustainable energy

“I had a fantastic one to one coaching/facilitation session with Jamie. He really took the time to understand my training needs and some of the internal challenges I face working day to day in my role. Jamie was easy to get along with and we quickly formed a connection allowing me to feel comfortable to share my experiences and challenges. My session combined some bespoke recommendations and solutions for meetings I want to hold at work along with practical tips and examples of great facilitation in general. It was really valuable session and I’ve come away with knowledge I know I’ll use throughout the rest of my career.”