Meaning-Making Workshops for Professional Teams

1. Personal Meaning

We help individuals articulate and deepen their understanding of what makes their daily work significant and fulfilling. By reflecting on questions such as “What is meaningful about what I do every day?” and “How does my individual work resonate with my personal values, ethics, and vision of a good life?” professionals reconnect with intrinsic motivation, creative satisfaction, and clarity of purpose.

2. Organizational Meaning

We facilitate reflection on each participant’s role within their organization, highlighting their contributions and connections to broader strategic aims. Participants explore questions like “What part do I play in the story our organization tells about itself?” and “How does my role influence, support, or shape the work of my colleagues?” This fosters a sense of belonging, alignment, and collective clarity about organizational purpose.

3. Social and Historical Meaning

Finally, our workshops open space for collective exploration of the broader societal and historical significance of participants’ professional fields and specific organizations. Together, we consider deeper questions such as “How does our profession shape—and how is it shaped by—historical, cultural, and economic change?” and “What philosophical ideas or cultural narratives underpin our industry today, and how might these be evolving?” By engaging in these conversations, teams gain perspective on their place within a larger narrative, enhancing cohesion, cultural agility, and strategic adaptability.

Our multi-layered approach sets GWG’s workshops apart. Rather than providing simplistic solutions or standard skill-building sessions, our workshops offer thoughtful, intellectually rigorous experiences designed to help participants and teams achieve clarity of purpose and deeper professional fulfillment. In a landscape where professionals frequently grapple with disconnection, burnout, and uncertainty, we explicitly address these challenges through structured, purposeful meaning-making.

The benefits of these workshops—enhanced engagement, improved clarity, strengthened professional relationships—may seem intangible at first glance. Yet cultivating meaning in these intentional ways supports organizational effectiveness, coherence, motivation, and alignment in lasting ways.

Our workshops are fully customizable and can be delivered virtually or in-person at your organization’s New York City-area location. We invite you to explore these offerings further by scheduling a complimentary consultation with our Organization Partnerships Coordinator, Dr. Erin Mackie.

Your team's workshop will be led by an accomplished professional whose real-world success represents the highest levels of academic and literary achievement.

Our faculty and emeritus faculty includes Rhodes Scholars who have published with major presses, cultural critics leading prestigious magazines (e.g., the Editor-in-Chief of Bookforum), and former English department chairs from top universities.

Their writing appears in legacy publications like The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and The Atlantic, and their award-winning books and novels have been published by presses such as Simon Schuster, Penguin Random House, and Macmillan.

Our faculty have also taught literature and creative writing at elite institutions throughout the US, from Iowa Writers’ Workshop, to Cornell University, to the University of Chicago—yet, thanks to GWG, their teaching reaches beyond the small number of students who are admitted to those programs.

Every workshop facilitator at GWG is skilled at translating their expertise into meaningful, impactful learning for professional teams across a wide range of fields and industries.

The command of attention is a foundational human skill, essential to creativity, meaningful reflection, and deep understanding. Although contemporary culture most commonly tackles the issue of attention through the lenses of psychology, neuroscience, and popular mindfulness practices, the cultivation of this ability has an even deeper lineage in the intellectual traditions of the humanities. Literary analysis, rhetorical studies, and philosophical inquiry have all long emphasized the value of sustained, focused attention to texts, arguments, and the complexities of experience.

This workshop re-introduces participants to techniques and insights drawn from the academic humanities, combining them with more familiar contemporary perspectives from psychology, neuroscience, aesthetics, and practices like meditation and yoga. We explore attention not merely as a cognitive function but as a culturally and historically shaped capacity, one that has been carefully developed by scholars, writers, and thinkers across many centuries.

Participants will reflect on how habits of attention—absorption and distraction, focus and diversion—are shaped not only by contemporary media environments, but also by older cultural and historical forces. Through exercises derived from deep reading (reading for pleasure), close reading (reading for literary analysis), reflective writing, and philosophical dialogue, the workshop guides individuals and teams toward a heightened awareness of their own attentional tendencies and the contexts that can be used to shape them.

We also discuss the implications of the contemporary “attention economy,” described vividly by author and New York Times podcast host Ezra Klein as an environment where “attention is the new money.” Recognizing the commercial and technological interests that seek to mine our attention, we return to historical examples and traditional humanities-based methods as tools for reclaiming that faculty.

By the workshop's conclusion, participants will have gained insights into attention as both a core humanistic skill and a practical, everyday resource, becoming more intentional in how they engage with their work, their professional environment, and each other.

This workshop stems from a controversial possibility: that the last thing anyone needs is more information. Innovation, creativity, and insight are not kinds of information but cognitive operations for processing knowledge and expressing ideas and states. Through their mastery of these operations, professionals achieve analysis and synthesis, lateral and metaphorical thinking, and evaluative, hypothetical, counterfactual, and creative thinking.

Traditionally, these ways of working with knowledge have been cultivated in higher education, scientific and technological research, and the creative arts, but their broader relevance to organizational design, problem solving, concept development, and innovation is amply acknowledged.

In this workshop, we examine these processes theoretically and position them as useful practices for your team’s specific professional context. We analyze exemplary instances of each, reflecting on their cultivation and application in our lives and work. By developing awareness and mastery of our own capacities for creativity, analysis, and insight, we become better equipped to identify opportunities for satisfaction and productive engagement in our professional lives.

This workshop begins with a historically and culturally varied survey of important concepts of work. The idea here is to identify and reflect on a range of types of work: free and unfree, paid and unpaid, skilled and unskilled, blue and white collar, casual, technical and creative, stable and contingent, service, professional, clerical, volunteer, contract, freelance. We look at how different kinds of value intersect with different kinds of labor. What kinds of work have been highly valued and why? How is this value expressed? Are the highest paid jobs always the most prestigious?

Drawing on participant experience, this workshop uses short writing exercises and discussion to guide reflection on a set of fundamental questions: Why and how do we work? What do we ask from our work and what does it ask from us? What do we say about our work and what does it say about us? Work takes many forms and has many flavors. So when we talk about work we draw from a whole grab bag of words: job, career, vocation, calling, gig, post, opportunity, position, opening, toil, slog, drudgery, chore.

These explorations support conscious awareness of the professional decisions and directions we take, and so help cultivate a more integrated, more authentic relation to the enterprise that participants have undertaken together.

In this workshop, we introduce a thumbnail history of the type of organization your team represents. (This could be any type of corporation, company, or nonprofit.) One goal here is to frame a big picture in which participants can find a place and orient themselves toward possible futures. For people to make effective strategic decisions, they need to have a sense of where they stand and how they got there. Engagement and motivation thrive where a shared enterprise can be imagined and adapted.

Concentrating on the specific enterprise that participants are engaged in, this workshop draws on their experience and knowledge to draft a kind of narrative portrait, or biography, of that enterprise. We look at its origin, its legal identity, its function, and its relation to government and law.

Then, from information that the organization offers the public and its employees, we ask what stories it tells about itself, its mission, vision and purpose, its achievements and aspirations. What forms do these stories take? Who are their audiences? Are these organizational portraits and narratives and self-portraits touched up and updated?

Turning to the individual participants, we ask what role they see themselves taking in this organizational narrative. Do they already have a seat at the table or will they need to realize their place through creative positioning?

Finally, to help clarify their own professional identity and aspirations, participants are invited to draft their own narrative portrait, or biography, of their organization.

This workshop touches on elements central to our first two workshops on the mind—processes such as sustained, absorptive attention, and metaphorical, hypothetical, and counterfactual thinking. All of these are essential to self-reflective awareness, open-mindedness, and emotional perceptiveness. Crucially, this workshop emphasizes that ethical thinking and reasoning are not rigid or dogmatic, but rather open-ended analytical skills. By approaching ethics as a flexible practice—one informed by imaginative exploration, storytelling, and genuine curiosity—participants cultivate their capacity for nuanced ethical analysis, capable of accommodating multiple perspectives.

The workshop proceeds through three sections. The first focuses on breadth of perspective, encouraging participants to contemplate the sheer quantity and multiplicity of people and situations outside their immediate sphere. The second explores how we relate to and discuss complicated issues involving multiple stakeholders. Finally, drawing on these encounters with the unknown and unfamiliar, participants explore frameworks and techniques that use storytelling (the purposeful construction of narratives) as a method for ethical analysis. Through this approach, they practice the novelists’ art of testing theoretical moral frameworks within “simulated” realities—ones they must attempt to experience as honestly and convincingly as possible, through the imagined perspectives of people unlike themselves.

This skill, we contend, is useful beyond literary practice; indeed, it is directly applicable to wide-ranging professional contexts. The hypothetical and imaginative thinking practiced in this workshop enhances the ability to approach problems from multiple perspectives, enriching participants' ethical sensitivity and analytical rigor. The awareness and agility exercised by this kind of perspective-taking also support the evaluation of impact and risk, and enable reasoned speculation about how a statement, image, product, process, or project might be received within diverse psychological, cultural, or contextual terrains.