Meet the Team
Deborah Welch
I know the moment a room shifts — when a group stops talking past each other and starts actually moving. I've spent my career learning how to make that moment happen on purpose.
Over three decades, I've led organizations across the globe — Director of the American School of Doha in Qatar, Deputy Head at the International School of Bangkok, CEO of the Academy of International School Heads., and a Senior Consultant for Carney Sandoe. I've sat with leaders carrying more responsibility than any job description prepared them for. And I've seen the same thing happen, over and over: when people have the right structure, something changes. The conversation gets real. Decisions get made. People walk out feeling like they actually did something.
That's not luck. That's facilitation — and it's a skill anyone can learn.
One participant stopped mid-session and told the room, "We've just been given a master class." That's exactly what Strategy Cards is built around — giving you the tools and the confidence to create that moment yourself.
When it works, that feeling belongs to everyone in the room. Including you.
Joellen Killion
I’ve always believed that potential isn’t the problem. The problem is what gets in the way of it.
Over a career spanning classrooms, school systems, and organizations around the globe — as a teacher, coach, administrator, curriculum specialist, and consultant — I’ve watched what happens when the right conditions are created. People surprise themselves. Teams that seemed stuck start moving. A room full of different perspectives finds a shared direction. It doesn’t happen by accident. It happens because someone built the structure for it.
My writing on facilitation, including The Zen of Facilitation, has been part of the field for decades. But theory only matters if it translates. And the work I’m most proud of always happens live — in real rooms, with real stakes, where real decisions need to get made.
Strategy Cards is the distillation of that work. Created with Deb and Susan, two colleagues I trust completely, it gives you the same tools we’ve relied on for years — designed so you can use them without a facilitator in the room. Because the goal was never to make you dependent on us. It was to make you better without us.
Susan Sparks
My purpose, as long as I can remember, has been helping people create the future they want — not just manage the one they’re stuck in.
Over 35 years working with schools, universities, nonprofits, and government organizations, I’ve sat across the table from a lot of people who weren’t sure they could get to the other side of something. Conflict. Gridlock. Teams that had lost their trust in each other. I’ve also sat with people who simply wanted to build something great and needed a structure to do it.
The moment I return to most is a quiet one. A team member I’d worked with for three years was heading to a new role. He handed me a note from his mother. She wrote that her son had become “a better son, father, and employee” because of how he’d learned to communicate and work with others. “I agree with everything she said,” he told me.
That’s the reason this work matters. And it’s why Strategy Cards exists — to put the same strategies Deb, Joellen and I have carried into rooms for decades into your hands. So you can build the kind of team where that kind of growth is possible.