Let’s get to know each other

When it is time for change, our team brings experience, confidence and forward momentum. We bring insights from renewing one of the world’s most celebrated humanitarian agencies as well as long standing practical experiences to bring together constellations of people from disparate teams, organizations, and jurisdictions. We are in there figuring it out with you, but the breakthroughs are yours.

The Outside Story

The Outside (TO) has led immersive systems change in organizations, collaborations, and communities for over a combined 100+ years. Embedded in the design, delivery, and learning across all activities are theories of change deeply rooted in established principles of power analysis, living systems, community-based participatory approaches, and rigorous and culturally inclusive evaluation and learning.

The Outside model draws on methodologies and expertise in complexity science, living systems, power, intersectionality, participatory leadership, learning and evaluation. Our team members practice these in small-scale and large-scale efforts across the public, non-profit, and private sectors and integrate a variety of systems change theories, including the Six Conditions of Systems Change by Senge et al.

Current Reality

Our world and our times are a deeply entangled mess. Shaped by events and decisions made over centuries and decades, we are at a nexus of extreme levels of income inequality, entrenched structural inequities, emboldened nationalisms, climate breakdown, and ecosystem collapse. These patterns are playing out in different ways at every level, from individuals to communities, organizations to global governance, and more.

At the same time, seeds of more generative and just futures are emerging everywhere.

Futures We Are Working Towards

Just. Socially just, economically just, ecologically just. It is the debt of history repaid and rebalanced so that all people, everywhere, can thrive.
Equitable. Remaking of structures and power relations across race, gender, class, nationality.
Ecologically Regenerative. Living in balance and within limits.
Long Arc of Change. It is not work we have started and it is not work we will finish.
New Futures. Working towards new futures internally and externally.

Team Bios

TIM MERRY

Founder of The Outside, Tim is an engagement specialist and systems change strategist who works with organizations from all over the world to lead break through change. For over 25 years Tim has helped major international businesses, government agencies, local communities and regional collaboratives to create the conditions for people to organize together and solve their own problems. Tim founded The Outside with Tuesday Rivera in 2018, and together they have built a remarkable team to spark systems change towards greater equity. Tim is one of the co-founders of the Art of Hosting, has been a supporter and board member of the Berkana Institute and is a co-founder of Mahone Bay United

DR. GABRIELLE DONNELLY

Dr. Gabrielle Donnelly is an educator and scholar-practitioner. Her work focuses on bridging social change theories and practices to support leaders and communities to engage with the complex issues of our times and create more compelling futures.
Gabrielle is Associate Professor of Community Development at Acadia University and a Lead Strategist at The Outside. She is also the Consulting Editor with World Futures: The Journal of New Paradigm Research.

GIAN PAUL GANZONI

Gian Paul is an Organizational Development Strategist building his contributions on his experiences in Human Resources, Strategy Development, Facilitation and Coaching. His passion to “enable organizations and individuals to succeed” is the driving force people appreciate, leveraging Nature as a source of inspiration. Gian Paul served as the Head of Organizational Change at the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) before joining The Outside in 2021.

JEN MCSWEEN

As Operations Manager, Jen is the administrative system that guides day-to-day operations including relationship management, organizational culture, and project management. Holding a Bachelor of Public Relations degree from Mount Saint Vincent University, Jen has worked in various communications and event management roles, in many sectors - not-for-profit, corporate and government - throughout her career. Before joining The Outside, she spent 10 years working for the Government of Canada helping local constituents to navigate bureaucracy to achieve desired outcomes.

Theory of Change & Principles of Action

Our Theory of Change + Action is the best articulation we have so far of The Outside’s contribution to building a better world for all. We’re certain our understanding and approach will evolve, and we’re committed to revisiting our articulation of how change happens and how we best contribute as an organization.

We want to model that it is possible to do audacious, rigorous, informed, and professional work that makes a difference. In making this visible, we resist offering the simplistic certainty of some approaches to change work and instead articulate the confidence of our ethics, our integrity, and our deep commitment to the people we work with and to figuring it out together.

The Outside’s Theory of Change: What Creates Change?

Our approach is to partner with those impacted in the design and delivery of a strategy, engaging the depth and breadth of The Outside’s experience in order to meet the unique context of our partners’ needs. We build capacity and consistently practice equity and action learning in order to inform our partnerships and adjust our strategies and action for forward movement. We know that this often requires personal and collective coaching around challenging topics like equity and power imbalance, and we excel at supporting groups to have these conversations and build responses to implicit and explicit bias into their own systemic change efforts.

Change is happening all around us. The way that The Outside activates and contributes to equitable and enduring change is through…

We actively attend to issues of equity and power - race, gender, class, nationality, ability, etc. - as a guiding orientation, ongoing practice, and a consideration at all stages and levels of systemic work.
We support organizations in testing and experimentation as the primary method for making large-scale change. The results of action learning testing and experiments are integrated into long-term strategies and actions for transformation.
We create a culture of and parameters for participation within and among the stakeholders we work with, enabling collective and individual leadership, at all levels of an initiative.
We support the development of individual leader’s capacity and awareness. These leaders experience their own transformation as they do systemic change work, significantly increasing the likelihood of an initiative’s success.
We hold and implement a systems strategy lens to provide coherence across the initiative while navigating changing conditions and context. This approach allows for a consistent understanding of the system while also allowing for emergence and adaptation in response to internal and external shifts.

A teal, dotted, spiral pattern forming a circular shape against a black background.

As together, they encourage:

Healthier ways of relating and working together
Building capacity in people to sustain the long-term work
Openings toward greater structural equity
Possibilities for new approaches, policies, and interventions
Leveraging collective resources (including political will, time, and capacity)

The Outside’s Principles of Action: How Will We Get There?

Our Theory of Action is articulated as 11 key principles which outlines the ‘how’ of our work. For The Outside, we know that it is not just what we do but how we do it that is essential to creating the world we want to see. We are clear that these principles apply internally as well as guiding the work with external collaborators and clients.

Equity demonstrably informs discussion, decisions, and actions from the beginning of change processes and throughout.
Model joy, humanity, and possibility as an active stance.
Hold and encourage multiple worldviews, guided by an ethic of equity and justice. Encourage both dissent and alignment.
Bias towards action (but not without data-informed reflection and evaluation).
Consistently build the skills, knowledge, and practice of people to work differently and carry on working differently after The Outside leaves.
Support discernment on what in the current system aligns with a better future and what needs to be let go. Challenge when needed.

Actively engage power across the current system.
Focus on relationships while keeping in sight the need for structural changes.
Integrate theoretical rigor with practical realities
Ensure high degrees of participation and increased voice across the system.
Support people to change by encouraging a better awareness of themselves and their actions, how these interact with the systems they are working in and how this influences the system.