The recent New York Times opinion piece,The Rise of the New Groupthink, poses a challenge to the rising trend of increased collaboration in business and schools. Susan Cain reminds us that creativity requires solitude and discusses at length the growing lack of autonomy and privacy in open offices and schools that seem to encourage group [...]

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At NCI, we are interested in not just how to plan and run a successful charrette but how to assure long-term project success. Visionary projects get approved and built in a timely fashion when strong leadership is combined with a collaborative team approach. On one end of the leadership spectrum you have the guru approach [...]

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By Bill Lennertz for Planning magazine, October 2011 There is a saying that a charrette will succeed so long as people show up. Unfortunately, that’s easier said than done because planners have always struggled to fill public meetings with people who represent all community viewpoints. Now new tools and strategies are getting a good result [...]

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What better cause is there for a charrette than the post-disaster period when recovery planning must be done quickly? Post-disaster work involves lots of stakeholders, each with their individual missions who must now work in concert to assist the community in their recovery and rebuilding. The NCI Charrette System™ kick-starts the rebuilding effort through a [...]

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NCI will facilitate an on-the-job training this August for planning staff from tornado stricken communities near Birmingham, Alabama. Jefferson County planners saw charrettes as the way to accelerate the recovery planning process and contacted NCI to request NCI Charrette System™ training for capacity building for local staff and consultants to run their own charrettes. The [...]

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The Contra Costa Centre Transit Village is a prime example of the power of the charrette to transform a community. The project now in phase three, is fast becoming a poster child for Transit Oriented Development. In 2000 the County decided to use a 6-day charrette led by Portland firm Lennertz Coyle and Associates, to [...]

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NCI launches The Charrette Way blog NCI is excited to announce the launch of a new blog- The Charrette Way: Achieving Collaborative Mastery. For the past 10 years NCI has been primarily developing, practicing and teaching the tools and techniques for running projects using charrettes, or the NCI Charrette System. The Charrette Way will take [...]

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Charrettes for Healthcare Planning May 4, 2011, 10:00-11:30 am PDT (1:00-2:30 pm EDT) Note: after live webinar date a recording will be available free for paid participants Overview In this webinar you will learn how charrettes are being used to facilitate a holistic approach to healthcare planning that goes beyond the hospital walls to affect [...]

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Charrettes are ideal for projects in which development is imminent, and/or when there is a real developer to implement the results. Charrettes are especially useful for projects that have significant community impact and contentious situations that require conflict resolution. For a charrette to be successful, participants must be prepared and informed about the process, and [...]

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NCI and Habitat for Humanity International are pleased to announce that we have entered into a strategic alliance for the purposes of advancing the cause of healthy and sustainable affordable housing. Early this year, several staff from Habitat attended a NCI Charrette System™ Certificate Training. Following the training, Habitat began using the NCI Charrette System™ [...]

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