Our Offering
&friends supports companies that want, on a small or large scale, to create and deploy digital products and tools that take into account both user needs and business objectives.
&friends Workshops
&friends supports companies that wish, on a small or large scale, to create and deploy digital products and tools that take into account both user needs and business objectives.
Business Design
Design Sprint
Strategic retreat
Foresight (Futures Thinking)
Strategic foresight is a compass for navigating an ever-changing world. It enables you to anticipate trends, identify emerging opportunities, and steer your business with a clear vision of the future.
Service Blueprint
Innovation
Project Framing
Ecosystem Analysis
Our Trainings
For new ways of working to truly have an impact, it is important to spread them and encourage their use. In addition to helping organizations perform better, teaching new approaches allows you to validate and evolve them. With this in mind, we have developed several courses that we have gathered under the &friends Academy.
- Miro Training
- The digital whiteboard quickly becomes indispensable for creative and efficient teams. In this training, you will learn to effectively use the basic tools, discover tips and tricks to save time, and explore the best ways to optimize your online collaborative workshops. Training lasts between 3 to 6 hours depending on your needs.
- Design Thinking 101
- Do you want to discover design thinking and see if it meets your needs? In 1 hour, half a day, or a full day, you can explore, get introduced to, or experience design thinking both theoretically and practically.
- Applied Design Thinking
- Want to start integrating design thinking into your organization? Over 3 or 5 days, we will go through all the stages of design thinking in an applied learning format focused on a subject that matters to you. This highly personalized training requires significant preparatory work, but it guarantees a positive transformation of your work methods.
- Design Sprint
- Do you want to learn the famous Google Venture Design Sprint? No problem. In 2 or 3 days, you will experience all the activities of the method and grasp the essentials needed to launch on your own!
- Creating a Collaborative Workshop
- Generally, one hour of workshop requires 3 hours of preparation – that’s the secret of the pros. Knowing how to lead and facilitate is essential, but mastering the design, preparation, and planning of a workshop is key to success. In this training, you will learn how professionals build their workshops, starting with the objective in mind.
- Becoming a Facilitator
- Whether you want to pursue it as a career or simply add this skill to your repertoire, this training will introduce you to the theoretical and practical basics of facilitation, along with tips, tricks, and proven techniques to help you get started with confidence.
- Mentorship
- After the trainings… we offer the possibility of mentorship, either in groups or one-on-one! The role of a facilitator varies greatly depending on the context and is constantly evolving. If you want to develop your skills and progress rapidly, we recommend mentorship. Over the past 10 years, we have conducted hundreds of workshops with very diverse groups – take advantage of it!
Conferences
In French, in English, or "Montreal style"… we offer both local and international conferences. With &friends, there’s no disguised sales pitch – we hate that as much as you do. We prefer to focus on what we do best: methods, research, techniques, and concrete results in business design, co-design, and design thinking.
Moreover, although we can deliver a captivating keynote of 30 to 90 minutes, we much prefer interactive conferences. They are more engaging for the audience, more motivating for us, and ultimately, we will present a conference they will remember.
A few talks from recent years
From Québec City to Stockholm, by way of Rome, London and Amsterdam: a selection of talks given by the &friends team.
- La Partie Prenante : le jeu qui fait exploser les silos (et réinvente la collaboration)
- StratEDGY: Reframing the Core of Strategic Thinking
- Easy to Use, Hard to Master: How to Navigate EDGY
- Building Bridges in Multiple Dimensions
- Master Class on Enterprise Design
- A Year on the Edge
- Co-Designing Enterprise Coherence
- Dear Designers, This One’s on You…
- The Branding Sprint: Alignment Before Creation
- Creativity? From the Heart, the Gut, and the Guts
- Website Patterns: Design as a Solution-Oriented Practice
Frequently asked questions about our services
What we get asked most often before choosing a format.
Our formats
What is the difference between a workshop, a training and a talk?
A workshop produces a result for your project: a framed strategy, a tested prototype, a map of your ecosystem. A training builds a skill your teams keep: design thinking, facilitation, Miro. A talk opens a subject for a large group, in 30 to 90 minutes, preferably in an interactive way. Workshops, trainings, talks.
How long does a design sprint take?
How long is a strategic retreat?
Half a day, two days or a week, depending on the course to clarify. Either way, you leave with concrete, measurable actions, not only a vision.
What is a framing workshop?
A workshop to pin down what’s at stake in an initiative, align the team on shared goals and chart the route before investing. It’s often the best first step when a project is fuzzy or several teams are involved. Our workshops.
In practice
Do you work remotely, and in which language?
In French and in English, in person in Montréal and Québec City, remotely anywhere else. Many of our workshops run on Miro, and we train your teams on the tool when needed.
How do we choose the right format for our situation?
Write to us with the problem, not the format. In one conversation we’ll tell you whether it’s a workshop, a sprint, a training or something else, and we build custom when nothing fits. Write to us.