The People Behind The SyncForward™ Methodology
Regional workforce initiatives don’t fail for lack of effort. They fail because the right people never align on the supply and demand needs between qualified talent and the candidates employers actually need.
40% of businesses can’t take on more work because they can’t fill the jobs they have. This is one consequence of a complex, systemic problem.
WebStudy Foundation exists to change that – giving regions a structured way to coordinate employers, workforce commissions, economic development agencies, and post-secondary institutions around employer demand before funding decisions lock in more fragmented initiatives.
The WebStudy Foundation was not built from theory. It was built from frustration.
The problem wasn’t the employers, and it wasn’t the educators. It was that both systems were making consequential decisions separately, without employer demand as a shared compass.
Founder Gisele Larose’s career crossed both sides of the supply and demand challenge. After years of experience in corporate training and developing learning strategies at NovaCare for 12,000 employees across three divisions, she and her husband Curt Corbi invested in educational technology – acquiring and operating a learning management system across 8 states over 18 years. They watched well-meaning parties on both sides struggle to see the gap clearly, let alone close it.
To build a solution worthy of the problem, Gisele partnered with Todd Erickson, principal of Collaboration Arts. Todd’s practice is influenced by the work of Lenny Lind, author of Virtuous Meetings. Todd brings 20+ years of designing proven architecture for collaborative change: over 2,000 collaborative gatherings supported across government, corporate, nonprofit, and community sectors; 13 years of sustained support for the Vital Lands Illinois Network; and work with the United Nations, the Clinton Global Initiative, and AARP.
WebStudy Foundation researched the web of initiatives, relationships, and gaps between siloed efforts – identifying state and regional coalitions seeking change but hampered by insufficient funding and fragmented initiatives.
“No single organization can see beyond its own vantage point – and therefore
cannot meet a community’s learning and earning needs on its own.”
Collaboration Arts designs what comes next: a structured process that moves diverse stakeholders from trust-building through collective sensemaking to coordinated regional action.
But the deeper insight came from a pattern that kept repeating across every region, every coalition, every well-funded initiative.
Workforce commission directors who knew the data cold. Post-secondary presidents who had redesigned entire programs. Economic development leaders who had recruited employers into the region. All of them working hard. All of them looking for deeper explanations. And in doing so, all of them missing the same structural truth:
The problem wasn’t what they knew. It was that their intelligence was being applied inside a silo – producing sophisticated answers to the wrong question.
The smarter you are within your vantage point, the more convincing your partial view feels. That’s what makes this problem so persistent – and so invisible to the people closest to it.
WebStudy Foundation was built by people who had stood on enough sides of this problem to finally see it whole.
If that pattern sounds familiar, keep reading → Why Initiatives Stall
Our work begins with a System Snapshot – a structured diagnostic process that maps what silos cannot see before design and facilitation begins. From there, The SyncForward™ Methodology guides employers, workforce commissions, economic development agencies, and post-secondary institutions to produce shared regional decisions in real time.
Certified consulting partners are available as needed to carry execution to scale. For the full picture, visit Our Approach.
The challenges in front of us are too great to rely on conferences and sage-on-stage meeting formats. WebStudy Foundation enables educators and employers to turn silos into systems, region by region.
We partner with regional workforce boards, chambers of commerce, community foundations, economic development agencies, and higher education systems ready to move from siloed planning to coordinated action.
WebStudy Foundation was built to complement the national organizations leading the Skills First Movement – Jobs for the Future, Credential Engine, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation, and the T3 Innovation Network. Our role is to equip regions with a structured process to coordinate multi-stakeholder efforts around employer demand – doing what no single national organization can do from its own vantage point.
Do you know whether your region’s stakeholders are aligned early enough to make it scale?