UVIC INSTITUTE VISIONING
Client: University of Victoria, Gustavson School of Business & Faculty of Social Sciences
Dates: December 5, 2025
Departments: Visioning
The Invitation
The Deans of the UVic business school and Faculty of Social Sciences had been envisioning a cross-disciplinary institute that would catalyze research on societal impact. Solvable was invited to design and facilitate two visioning workshops with a cross-disciplinary group of UVic faculty members.
Context
The goal of the workshops was to identify the potential value of a new based on the perspectives of the faculty members who might participate in its creation, operations, and research. The workshops needed to create the space for insights and dialogue around the possibilities and concerns about the institute proposal, and identify commitment among faculty members.
SOLUTIONS
Together with the two Deans, we designed a three-hour visioning workshop that was hosted twice for group size. We had nearly 60 faulty members attend the workshop and with high acclaim by both participants and the Deans. We mixed modalities between small table group dialogues, large group discussions, and individual reflection and mapping. The session concluded with each person filling out a comment card whether they were committed, supportive, neutral, or skeptical. The most frequent response was committed with few selecting neutral and none selecting skeptical.
testimonials
These are a few of the comments shared by attending faculty on their commitment cards:
“Greate ideas + makes me feel great! Discussion about a multidisciplinary nexus of committed scholars wanting to work together to make a difference.”
“I was pleasantly surprised that there was appetite towards rethinking academic institutions.”
“Very encouraging discussion—more excited about this now than when I arrived this morning (and I was excited then). Starting to see more shape/focus to the proposed Institute.”
“High degree of energy, creativity and aspirational possibilities.”
“Great space to free-flow with ideas, energy and motivation to do something different with diversity of colleagues. Good to dream!”
