Peer-reviewed and field-tested research
Research gives us tested ways to recognize larger social patterns—and field experience helps us continue to examine and refine what we see.
Put Social Pattern Literacy to work.
Sunset in Idaho, where we live and work. Photo: Merrill Huntsman
Some situations are difficult not because people are failing, but because the world around them has changed—and familiar ways of organizing, deciding, or working no longer quite fit.
The Allison Group helps leaders, consultants, coaches, and investors understand changing conditions, recognize new possibilities, and put their understanding to work.
Supported action research · Available remotely worldwide
Social Pattern Literacy in Action
Learn to recognize emerging ways of organizing and working together—and use them to advance your goals in a rapidly changing world.
In this individually designed program of supported action research, you study both your own situation and the wider environment. You use AI in your research, drawing on the Allison Group’s experience applying it in action research.
Mary Ann brings more than three decades of research and practical experience to your work. She helps you focus your inquiry, drawing on her ongoing research and approaches suited to you and your questions.
Develop your ability to
- Read emerging patterns. Use historical patterns to recognize new ways of organizing and the conditions that help them take root.
- Choose a good fit. Match structures and processes to the problems you face, recognizing what to keep, adapt, or add.
- Build alliances of intention. Bring people and groups together around a shared intention, coordinating their contributions while preserving their independence.
- Learn through action. Put research findings into practice, study the results, and revisit your questions and goals as conditions change.
For example, to start you might ask
“How could our hospitals and clinics across five states use alliances of intention to combine our strengths and respond to changing needs in each community?”
“How could we build on new connections and shared intentions to create lasting change together?”
in Action
“To say Mary Ann Allison is an outside the box thinker is an understatement. Her systems thinking over the eras coupled with her visual and verbal creativity has blown open our minds and hearts in the best of ways. Any leader or company wanting to navigate into the future successfully should engage Mary Ann’s brilliance and guidance.”
Tanya Cruz Teller and Stephen ReadSpaciousness Works
Other ways to work with us
Conversations and advisory work
Shorter consulting and advisory engagements can address change leadership, organizational design, decision making, the future of work, or another question you bring.
Workshops, briefings, and speaking
Mary Ann designs workshops, executive briefings, and presentations for groups, professional communities, conferences, and convenings. Workshop topics often include leadership development, decision making, and organizational design.
The work is visual, participatory, and grounded in participants’ questions, helping people see their situation differently—with greater orientation, practical agency, and a grounded reason for hope.
“Mary Ann’s framework is sheer genius and a must-have for anyone committed to creating a better world. She offers a clear, brilliant model for us to navigate wild uncertainty and enter an unknown future with skillful intention and sanity.”
Anne Rose HartCEO, Anne Rose Hart; Pilot and Wing Walker
Have a question you’d like to explore? Begin a conversation with Mary Ann
How we learn—and help others learn
No single way of knowing is enough for a changing world.
The Allison Group draws on several forms of learning to see more of the whole pattern—not merely the part that is easiest to measure. We use them selectively, depending on the people, the question, and the setting.
Action learning and “skinned-knee” experience
Real work, relationships, experimentation, and consequences teach things theory alone cannot.
Somatic learning and intuition
Sometimes the body recognizes a shift before we have words for it. Attention to embodied experience can help make emerging possibilities visible.
Appreciative inquiry and learning from others
We learn with people, not only about them—drawing on strengths, experience, and knowledge already present.
Grounding in place
Every question happens somewhere: within a particular landscape, community, history, and set of conditions. Place matters.
Art—especially poetry
Image, metaphor, imagination, and poetry can reveal relationships and patterns that analysis alone may miss—and help us carry new understanding into action.
Read Mary Ann’s poetry on the Ideas pageWe are also inspired by the resilience and imagination of people, the particularity of places, and the life and beauty that remind us what is worth creating.
“Mary Ann is a big-picture thinker and skilled communicator able to spin complex concepts—such as whole eras of human history—into accessible, actionable insights that can help anyone make sense of a rapidly changing world.”
Jeff CarrExecutive Director, Museum of Idaho
Begin with a question.
You do not need to know exactly what kind of engagement you need. Bring a question, challenge, opportunity, or decision you are facing. The first conversation is 45 minutes, with no charge.