For Organizations & Teams
Writing-based workshops on conflict, communication, and implicit bias.
Book a Discovery Call50+ workshops for faculty, department chairs, program staff, and cross-functional teams. 90% positive feedback. Ph.D., PMP.
Someone needs to say something difficult to someone else. They have been thinking about it for weeks. They have rehearsed it in the shower, in the car, at 2 AM. And it keeps not working. Because every version they rehearse is from their own frustration and their own version of the story.
The longer it doesn't happen, the more it costs.
There are two kinds of conflict at work.
Capital-C Conflict: the major events that you notice. A heated email thread that gets escalated to a manager. A missed deadline that turns into a blame meeting. An HR complaint. A public disagreement in front of leadership. These have a name and a face.
Lowercase-c conflict: the pattern. Different communication styles. The person who needs everything in writing paired with the person who wants to talk it out. Nobody's wrong. The styles just clash. And because nobody's wrong, nobody addresses it.
Most conflict training focuses on Capital-C. But lowercase-c is what grinds. It's the friction that compounds over months and years until someone calls it a "culture problem."
Everyone writes. Nobody is named. Nobody is exposed. The exercises change depending on what your team is carrying into the room.
Participants are not forced to share exactly what they wrote. They share what they discovered and learned from the exercise. In every exercise, you also confront your own biases.
The specific exercises depend on the team and the material.
50+ workshops for faculty, department chairs, graduate researchers, and program staff navigating cross-departmental friction, inclusive practices, and sensitive topics in high-stakes environments. Audiences ranged from public health to theatre to chemistry. I partnered with the Iowa City UNESCO City of Literature on a public workshop on having productive and respectful conversations around politics and facilitated a session on sensitive topics for the Iowa Writers' Workshop. At TREE Academy, I designed programming for a neurodiverse population where belonging had to be built into the structure, not assumed. 90% positive feedback.
A team of mostly new members needed to build trust and start functioning together. In the session, partners interviewed each other using only questions, no adding their own stories, no redirecting. Then each person designed a short tour for their partner based entirely on what they heard, and took them on it.
One participant said afterward that her partner had listened to her so well and built such an accurate reflection of who she is and how she functions that it was better than what some of her friends and family, people she had known for years, had ever done.
That was one exercise in one afternoon. The team was connected by the end of the session in a way that would have taken months of regular meetings to build, if it happened at all.
Post-Session Results
94.3% of participants rated the experience very good or excellent.
100% said the facilitator was respectful of participants.
100% said the facilitator was accessible to participants.
Ready to talk about your team?
Book a 15-Minute Discovery CallParticipants leave with a revised message and a repeatable method for a real conversation. Words they can use on Monday.
If you recognized your team in any of those, the format below is how we work.
If you are a clinician or leader looking for help with your public voice rather than team workshops, reach out directly at erik@survivalkitwritingcollective.com.
The room matters as much as the curriculum. Who feels safe enough to try something determines whether the content is usable.
All formats include the Structured Expression method. Longer sessions go deeper. Pricing depends on format and team size.
Core compression and perspective-writing exercises. Participants leave with revised material for a real conversation.
Full exercise sequence including persona work and writing from the other person's position. Deeper debrief and discussion.
Cross-functional exercises, values alignment, real-time drafting. Multiple rounds of writing. Teams work through actual conflicts and leave with language and a repeatable practice.
Full-day initial session plus quarterly half-days. New challenges each quarter. The practice builds over time.
The Facilitator
Erik Fuhrer, Ph.D., PMP. 50+ workshops for faculty, program staff, and cross-functional teams navigating conflict, communication, and inclusive practices. Author of nine books. Work featured in Psychology Today.