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We are a worker co-op that helps leaders and teams work well with conflict.
In a world of rising conflict, polarization, and uncertainty, progressive organizations face unique challenges. At Waterline, we are a worker-owned cooperative dedicated to helping leaders and teams navigate conflict with clarity, courage, and compassion. We believe that healthy, equitable teams are built on the foundation of transformative leadership—starting from the inside out.
Why Waterline?
Progressive organizations often find that the very issues they aim to address in the world also manifest within their own teams. Internal conflict can undermine even the most visionary missions, leading to frustration and a sense of disconnect between values and actions. We help you engage conflict in a way that transforms painful and tough patterns into catalysts for learning, creativity, and collective resilience. Our approach is rooted in the belief that conflict can be a powerful, generative medicine. We have experienced that when engaged skillfully, conflict can increase positive social impact, prevent burn-out, and strengthen relationships, while adding joy and depth to life.
Our Approach: Grounded in Wisdom, Built for Action
We bring together several methods to nourish the experiential work we do. Our core lineages include Lewis Deep Democracy, Process Work, and trauma-informed embodiment practices along with with decolonial, liberatory, and counter-oppressive learning frameworks. This unique combination ensures that your team not only navigates conflict effectively but also creates spaces where vulnerability can be held, power can be negotiated ethically, and the learning is deeply embodied and actionable.
What We Offer:
Leadership Development: We offer highly attuned process-oriented coaching that blends dialogue with somatic (mind-body) awareness and action. We help leaders cultivate self-awareness, emotional intelligence, and tap their own experiences to navigate the challenges they are facing.
Team Process: We help you spot the precise "acupuncture points", or generative conversations, that the team has been circling around. Then, we help the team empathically and consensually navigate their edges to truly engage the issues rather than fight against personalities.
Practical Tools: We equip your team with actionable strategies to address conflict constructively, fairly, and often in surprisingly enjoyable and dynamic ways.
Trauma-Informed Practices: When our nervous systems register safety, we can learn together, feel together, and connect. We strive to respond ethically to safety issues present at all levels, from the structural to the different needs of different bodies.
For Social Purpose Leaders, By Social Purpose Leaders
As a worker co-op, we live the values we teach. We understand the challenges of building equitable systems, and democratic decision-making because we’re doing it ourselves. Whether you’re navigating internal tensions, strengthening team dynamics, or preparing for high-stakes conversations, Waterline is here to support you every step of the way.
Ready to Transform Conflict into Connection?
Let’s build a movement where conflict isn’t something to fear—it’s a doorway to deeper understanding, stronger relationships, and lasting change.
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Facilitation
We facilitate team meetings and stakeholder conversations that serve the double benefits of arriving at decisions and building stronger relationships. We design and deliver customized sessions ranging from a few hours to a few days to meet the specific needs of each group. We rely on the tools of Deep Democracy, along with other complementary methodologies, to help people have the strategic or difficult conversations they need to have, bringing out the wisdom and creativity inherent in groups.
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Education and Coaching
We make an impact in the world by enabling people to be skillful in relation to conflict. Our courses and coaching offer a highly experiential deep-dive into a fresh way of understanding group dynamics and ourselves. We provide simple tools to make sense of how we build relationships, navigate power, and make strategic decisions. Learners on the waterline pathway become more relaxed and centered in the midst of chaos and adept at navigating groups safely through stormy seas.
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Conflict Engagement
Engaging conflict is at the centre of our expertise and often the reason we are called in by clients. When tempers flare and team or interpersonal dynamics become painful, it can throw everything out of balance. Our compassion, clear seeing, and skill in working sensitively with conflicts helps groups find their way to the other side. Developed in the fire of post-apartheid South Africa, our Deep Democracy tools are particularly apt at getting at the root of conflicts while making it safe to work with them in a productive manner and in favour of staying in relationship.
Testimonials
I am a senior organization development practitioner with many years of facilitation, mediation, and conflict resolution training and practice. However, I was drawn to Deep Democracy because of the unique paradigm of the process that encourages the uncovering and amplifying of differences, in service of giving a voice to all and ensuring decisions arrived at are real decisions that can truly be committed to by all. It was invaluable for me to do this training with two of my leadership team colleagues, As a result, we are exploring ways to bring this methodology to the teams of consultants we lead.
After taking this course I can feel my well established resistance to conflict slipping away a little more. The tools and theory contained in this course invite us into the work of hosting a world in which conflict is generative, necessary and life-giving. The tools help make this work feel possible.
For experienced practitioners there is no end to the learning about how to work with difference. The journey to improve ones resourcefulness in this area is critical work to do in a world that is deeply divided and where those deep divisions are reinforced by echo chambers, algorithms and malevolent intent. No matter where you are on your path as a leader or a facilitator, you will find an invitation in this course to a way to go deeper.