Brain-Based Workplace, LLC
We apply evidence-based principles & practices
to help values-driven organizations
infuse growth, learning, & excellence into everything they do.
Overview
At the Brain-Based Workplace, we help values-driven organizations become more Peacefully Productive & Radically Response-able in two ways: by applying evidence-based insights and best practices from the fields of psychology and organizational behavior; and through incorporating ongoing, data-driven learning cycles drawing on design-thinking principles. Using these perspectives at the individual, team, and organizational levels, our coaching and consulting work focuses on excellence in the following domains:
- Giving & Receiving Feedback
- Communication & Conflict Resolution
- Decision-Making Processes
- Masterful Self-Management
See How We Work for details and examples of what we offer.
For our evidence-based framework on effective organizations, read our piece on the Building Blocks of Organizational Culture.
What Guides Us?
Mission-driven organizations do urgent work in our communities and for the environment, but internally they are often plagued by burnout, high turnover, and frustrating inefficiencies. This presents a stark dissonance: the values of advancing sustainability and benefiting people--the very values that drive the external products of their work--are not integrated into the internal dynamics and processes of the organizations themselves. We focus on clarifying and integrating these values into an organization's communication, decision-making, and management practices.
We use two anchors, Peaceful Productivity and Radical Response-ability, to provide the foundation for this effort.
What is Peaceful Productivity?
Peaceful Productivity is a way of working individually and in teams that prioritizes both maximizing productivity and engaging peacefully with ourselves and others. Our perspective sees these two priorities as mutually enhancing, not mutually exclusive. This balance is achieved through understanding and working with—not struggling against—the way our brains evolved. Our thesis (and the evidence aligns!) is that when we treat people as people, not machines, they and their contributions appreciate.
This represents a paradigm shift from that of the assembly line that dominated the Industrial Revolution to the knowledge workers who pervade the Information Economy. Unfortunately, many workplaces are stuck using an Industrial-era psychology while hoping for Information Age work. It’s like using a typewriter to send an email—no wonder there is so much frustration!
What is Radical Response-ability?
Radical Response-ability refers to people who initiate goal-oriented action, responding flexibly and creatively to this end regardless of what obstacles arise. As opposed to reflexive reaction, they use all interactions (even and especially challenging ones) to respond intentionally in service of goals they have actively chosen or created.
“Radical” suggests that they address and act from root causes and assess all effects of their actions. While many organizations claim to promote empowerment, their structures and mindsets actually implicitly encourage approval-seeking, compliance, risk avoidance, and blame. Individuals and organizations founded on Radical Response-ability systematically root out these behaviors and the structures and mindsets that support them, replacing them with new paradigms of work that support Peaceful Productivity.
Theory of Change
We use 3 Levers for Transformation: Skills, Structures, & Stories. Structures activate and enable the skills they trigger, and skills in turn bring structures to life. Stories give meaning and direction to this life.
Skills
We work with individuals to develop their habits & capabilities across our 3 domains to promote Peaceful Productivity & Radical Response-ability.
Structures
We work together to create personal and team structures that make valued behaviors easy to do and promote their adoption among new team members.
Stories
We identify the dominant stories and mental models in an organization that guide what is done, along with the why and how behind it. We then engage our clients in assessing the alignment of these stories with their skills, & structures, refining each of these three Levers to ensure they are as effective and values-driven as possible.
The Organizational Learning Paradigm
"A quick fix is neither." -Christine King
You can iterate your culture just like you iterate your product! Drawing on agile and design thinking principles and tools, we guide and teach processes that reveal the skills, structures, and stories in need of development and transformation. This process involves an ongoing and collaborative Data-Define-Dream-Design-Do cycle: Data gathering to see what is currently happening; Defining the challenges (organizational dynamics that both support and impede innovation & execution) based on data patterns; Dreaming up wildly successful futures; Designing interventions that bridge current reality and future dreams; Doing the planned intervention to test assumptions & efficacy; and gathering Data again to assess efficacy and inform next steps.
This entire cycle takes place in collaboration with the client; it is a process we guide and participate in, but distinctly not one we just do and deliver. If you are looking for a consultant to diagnose and fix your organization as you might look to a doctor to diagnose and fix your back, the Brain-Based Workplace is not a fit for you. If, however, you are looking for a consultant to discover new data to be interpreted through new lenses, and to support you in transitioning to a more ideal future using that information and understanding, give us a call. We cannot just chauffeur you to your desired future, and we refuse to pretend we can to impress (and ultimately disappoint) you; we can navigate together and learn what the conditions for success and transformation look like, while working with you to develop the skills and structures to get there.
What We Do
In addition to helping organizations clarify their values and translate them into concrete norms, our workshops, retreats, and ongoing coaching & consulting focus on excellent Skills & Structures in the domains below.
Giving & Receiving Feedback
- Skills: We train teams & coach individuals to give and receive feedback in ways that promote growth mindset and psychological safety. This helps across the board in dealing with defensiveness.
- Structures: We consult with clients to develop feedback processes and performance management systems that support high-performing, accountable teams and build learning organizations.
Communication & Conflict Resolution
- Skills: We train teams & coach individuals to make conflict constructive, especially in high-growth environments in which norms and needs shift rapidly. This reduces unnecessary frictions and increases the trust, creativity, and win-win outcomes that constructive conflict can engender.
- Structures: We consult with clients to integrate 1-on-1, team, and org-wide structures that surface tensions early for quick resolution. We also help teams build highly effective meetings that support engagement, creativity, & data-driven dialogue.
Decision-Making Processes
- Skills: We train teams & coach individuals to identify the most appropriate decision type for alignment upfront, and then to communicate who will play what roles. This includes a process of advocating for different roles as individuals grow and organizations change.
- Structures: We consult with leaders to move beyond "leaders who empower" to "systems that empower" so that decision-making is clear and effective regardless of who is managing a team or process. This includes overcoming obstacles in cognitive biases & group dynamics.
- We also act as external facilitators of key decision-making processes such as strategic planning for companies or specific departments.
Masterful Self-Management
- Skills: We teach and coach individuals in two sub-domains: strategic time management and emotional intelligence.
- Strategic Time Management - We teach people the psychology of habit formation. Then, we apply that to managing time and attention in proactive ways, ones that prioritize your highest values & goals instead of reactively and stressfully fighting fires.
- Emotional Intelligence- We support people in developing the self- and relational awareness that helps individuals and teams navigate the inevitable frictions that arise in relationships. Our focus here is on communicating and coping with difficult emotions and exploring the power in accepting all parts of ourselves.
- Structures: Both individually and organizationally, strong structures and norms make clear focus and resilience easier. We provide templates and examples, then coach you to iterate and adapt them to your own situation.
How We Do It
Once we have identified an individual, team, or organization's growth areas, we use the modalities below to help them get there. While these modalities give a sense of what we have done in the past, we work with each of our clients to customize an offering suited to their needs. We also leverage a lightweight technology to ensure sustained behavior change after the session--then use the data from that to iterate going forward.
Workshops
We run workshops for small teams to whole organizations, ranging from 1-hour sessions to multi-session modules over several weeks or months. A far cry from the token annual training, our workshops engage participants in determining the desired changes and practicing them together.
Retreats & Off-sites
We coordinate on- and off-site retreats for all staff, department teams, or executive leadership. We generally view retreats as situated in the middle of a transformation process. In this light, we partner with our clients and participants beforehand to ensure the retreat enables the pivotal personal and interpersonal changes needed, and we follow up afterwards to make these changes into enduring habits. The retreats themselves are always grounded in participatory, experiential learning.
Consulting Contracts
Based on the organizational learning process described in the Approach section above, we engage with change-makers in organizations over the course of several months to effect systemic, enduring transformation across one or all teams.
Coaching
We provide 1-on-1 and 1-on-team coaching across all levels of an organization. The intensive format of coaching enables individuals to make dramatic performance improvements and, in doing so, can support larger organizational change efforts. For leaders wanting to raise their game to have the most powerful impact possible, coaching is a terrific place to start.
Where We Work
The Brain-Based Workplace is based in the San Francisco Bay Area. We work with organizations locally and across the world.
Clients & Testimonials
Partial Client List
"Immediately able to spot ways to improve our feedback processes."
"I have managed teams for 9 years. I learned how to be a manager though mentoring and self study. I found my sessions with Jack were extremely helpful and informative. I would have loved to have such informative and structured coaching sessions early on in my career. Coaching like this would have minimized my errors in the past. I hope every first time and to-be managers go through this training, these sessions are invaluable!!"
"I loved how concrete the exercises were!"
"I've been to a lot of these culture workshops over the last few decades, and this was one of the best workshops I've ever been to--and we do this for a living."
"Jack strikes the right balance between rigorous intellectual theory and concrete hands-on tools that I can use the next day. He takes nebulous concepts like "culture" and "communication" and makes them very concrete, with actionable insights and real results. Weekly meetings with my team turned from boring checklists to opportunities for real connection and action. He taught me how to truly support my team without needing to solve their problems for them -- which not only helped them grow as leaders, but also helped me avoid burnout."
"I think it was an extremely valuable exercise for us. Far exceeded expectations."
"Very constructive! Adjusted how I thought about conflict."
"The workshop is incredibly relatable. An easy-to-understand workshop through something we believe to be really complicated."
"These skills are so important for workplace harmony and productivity. Thanks!"
Biomedical Engineering: Systems Neuroscience & Neuroengineering
“You've been so helpful. I'm really learning to love and live by my values, which I think will really enrich all of my life! Finding myself through leadership....who knew??!”
“I think we've really made significant progress on our initial goals…and I can assure you that what you are doing is transformative for us.”
“I like the practical application… the Tiny Habits part was really interesting and I think forced us all to get VERY deliberate and really start breaking our actions down. I also really like the way you allow for free flow conversation but also effectively bring us back in.”
T-REX Group: The Renewables Exchange
"I’ve been doing this [work] for thirty some years and have never done something like this. This was the best offsite of my entire career. Thank you.”
“I’ve been having better disagreements.”
“Thank you for one of the best workshops I have ever taken part of. I truly enjoyed your workshop and took away so much that I can use personally and professionally.”
"I'm excited by the idea of attaching new habits to existing behaviors and look forward to practicing it."
"Thank you for bringing your incredible knowledge, skills, experience, and passion to our retreat. We all so appreciated it!"
"Jack and the Brain-Based Workplace recently led a strategic planning retreat for The Jewish Studio Project. It was game changing for us. Jack provided the perfect balance of push and support. The activities were engaging and constructive and built on one another generatively and seamlessly. Jack was made for working on the hard stuff with organizations. He is wise and his soft presence, keen intuition and quick processing make it feel like you're working with someone who you’ve known for decades. We are so grateful to have found him as a consultant."
Team
Jack Cohen
Jack started the Brain-Based Workplace in 2014 to integrate and apply lessons from a career spanning the for-profit, nonprofit, and education sectors. This included both working in commercial finance for a Certified B(enefit) Corporation and teaching psychology, which forms the foundation of much of his consulting and coaching practice. He continues to teach mindfulness and yoga.
His educational background includes a management degree from The Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania, a Master's in Education from the Reach Institute for School Leadership, and a fairly obsessive, ongoing, and broad-reaching learning journey beyond that.
Jack is devoted to working with people to make enduring changes that leave them more liberated and empowered to act and interact in the healthiest, most fulfilling ways possible. He specializes in applying this work within values-driven organizations.
Fun Fact: Jack's favorite compliment was when someone told him he was "a voracious learner."
Email: jack@brainbasedworkplace.com
Phone: (704) 756-1637
Mansi Jain
With over a decade of experience facilitating and coaching leaders, teams, and organizations across industries and geographies, Mansi's orientation highlights the importance of embodiment and the development of our 'inner operating system' (how we make sense of ourselves, others, and the world) in order to create lasting change.
Mansi integrates modern research and ancient wisdom around psychological, spiritual, and systems development. She draws on her background in consulting with McKinsey & Company, leading a large-scale organizational transformation from the ground up, teaching through Wharton's Leadership Program at the University of Pennsylvania, and her varied global experiences. She is a Certified Professional Co-Active Coach and has certifications with various tools, modalities, and institutions.
Originally from India, Mansi grew up moving internationally and spent several years in England, Thailand, Singapore, and Indonesia. She now lives with her partner in California, where she fills her free time with nature, music, adventure, play, and her own inner work.
Fun fact: Mansi has a deep love for hammocks (rope hammocks excluded).
Email: mansi@brainbasedworkplace.com
Andrew Molina
Andrew Molina (affectionately called Mo) is a transformative coach and facilitator who has worked with leaders at both early-stage and unicorn startups. In addition to building People Experience programs for organizations, Mo facilitates design strategy workshops and conducts user research efforts for organizations that want to deepen their understanding of their customers, including for clients such as Mitsubishi Estate, Udacity, and others.
He is a former curriculum designer at Stanford's d.school where he also coached students in applying design thinking to social problems in developing economies through the class Design for Extreme Affordability. Mo received undergrad (management science and engineering) and grad (computer science) degrees from Stanford and facilitates Interpersonal Dynamics, a course at the Stanford Graduate School of Business.
Fun Facts: Mo likes to climb rocks, is an actor, and loves playing games (board games, card games, made-up games, you name it). He's also on a quest for the world's greatest donut.
Email: mo@brainbasedworkplace.com
Catherine Pao
Catherine is a certified holistic leadership coach who focuses on cultivating inner leadership. She helps bring conscious intentionality to executives and teams through management leadership trainings, group coaching, and 1:1 coaching. She's coached leaders and teams from Google, Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, Nerdwallet, Nextdoor, HackerOne, Github, and other various startups.
Catherine believes that coming alive is the most meaningful gift you can give to yourself and the world around you. She is deeply motivated to help others come alive so they can fully feel the magic of being alive.
Formerly, Catherine led various digital marketing and growth product management teams at Blue Apron, Digital Ocean, Fab.com, and Microsoft. She's a certified professional Co-Active Coach (CPCC) and certified Yoga Instructor (RYT-300).
Fun facts: Catherine is an artist and has a greeting card & illustration line. Finding the perfect song that punctuates an everyday moment is one of her greatest pleasures.
Email: catherine@brainbasedworkplace.com
Andrew Gordon-Kirsch
Andrew Gordon-Kirsch is a leadership coach, facilitator, and consultant specializing in feedback and behavior change. He has spent the last decade helping people navigate the unknowns of transitions, first as a community organizer and later as an organization development consultant. Past clients include large companies like Kaiser Permanente and Facebook, as well as startups, nonprofits, and political advocacy groups. Andrew designs engaging experiences that take conversation and action to the next level.
Andrew also works an instructor for Bentley University’s Center for Women and Business programs on diversity, equity, and inclusion. His articles have been published in outlets such as Waging Nonviolence. He holds degrees in organizational change management from The New School and Arabic language from UCLA.
Fun fact: When not coaching or delivering workshops on inclusive culture change, Andrew can be found kayaking in a freshwater creek or working on his next backyard DIY project. He also scaled El Capitan.
Email: andrew@brainbasedworkplace.com
Jesse Torrence
Jesse is an Executive Coach and Organizational Development Consultant who helps mission-driven leaders and their teams unfold their full potential and achieve impact and equanimity in their professional and personal lives. Using a holistic, systems approach to understanding the whole person and the whole organization, and drawing on cutting-edge research and best practices in psychology, neuroscience, behavioral economics, organizational behavior, design thinking, and contemplative practices like mindfulness, Jesse empowers executives and their teams with new habits, structures, and processes that make their personal lives and their organizations more integrated, resilient, balanced, and productive.
Earlier in his career, Jesse launched and led a variety of social impact organizations focused on a variety of topics – from HIV prevention to citizen diplomacy to tech entrepreneurship to mindfulness education. Jesse also worked for the Obama Campaign and the World Bank and spent 10 years advising social entrepreneurs, philanthropists, political candidates, and elected officials in the US and abroad. In 2020, Jesse helped launch Elevate – an anti-racism and decolonization initiative at the Harvard Kennedy School. Jesse earned BAs in Economics and International Relations from Stanford and an MPA in International Development from Harvard, and more recently received coaching training from the Co-Active Training Institute.
Jesse lives with his wife and two kids in the Chicago suburbs.
Fun Facts: Jesse dabbles in philosophy, poetry, and piano, and is the grateful recipient of a heart transplant.
Email: jesse@brainbasedworkplace.com
Danny Cohen
Danny lives with an inspired vision of everyday relationships that are nourishing, creative, meaningful and leave us feeling more energized and alive rather than less. He has eagerly shared that possibility in working with leading CEOs and senior management teams in the tech and finance sectors and working with thousands of educators as a guiding teacher at Mindful Schools. He also thoroughly enjoys supporting people in the path of personal growth in 1on1 sessions and leading retreats at Or HaLev Center for Jewish Spirituality and Meditation, where he was the founding director.
Since graduating with a management degree from The Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania, Danny has spent the past decade plus exploring the pathways and practices that potentiate human flourishing. He draws from his background as a somatic and systems psychotherapist combined with extensive training in Marshall Rosenberg’s Nonviolent Communication.
Born and raised in the USA, Danny has been at home in Israel since 2011, is deeply committed to and in love with the world of meditation, regularly spending time on long retreat, and loves connecting with people more than anything. Danny is also on the core faculty of the Evolve Foundation.
Fun Fact: Danny and Jack are each other's longest-term collaborators...
Email: danny@brainbasedworkplace.com
