A workshop for people working towards a different economy in their organisation, their community, or their neighbourhood.
Build it Together
An Introduction to Design Thinking.
In 2 hours, discover what it actually feels like to start with a person rather than a solution, and why that changes everything about how change gets made.
£37 · 2 hours · Live online · Max 10 participants
What would it look like to build change with people rather than for them?
Human-centred design starts with people. It's a way of working that puts the people this change belongs to at the centre of every decision, from the very beginning, and builds solutions through listening, making, and learning together rather than planning in advance.
Build it Together takes you through the full human-centred design cycle in two hours, giving you a practical method for building change with your people, whatever context you're working in.
Most of us have been in the room where everyone agrees something needs to change. We've written the proposals, made the case, designed the initiative. And somewhere between the idea and the reality, something got lost.
Not because the thinking was wrong, but because the people this change was meant for weren't quite part of building it.
We've been exploring what happens when that changes. When the people this work belongs to are in the room from the very beginning, co-creating what gets made rather than responding to what's already been decided.
Waht happens? More real, authentic, value led?
That's what this workshop is for, and so is the room itself. By the end of two hours you’ll have a new method, and you'll have made something real alongside people who get it.
This workshop puts you in a room with a small group of people working on the same questions, and by the end you'll have built something together
Research on tipping points consistently finds that around 25% of a group, deeply committed and well-connected, is often enough to shift what everyone considers normal.
You don't need everyone. You need the right people, connected in the right ways, doing something real together.
Why reaching fewer people might be your most powerful strategy.
Complete purchase for Less is More, and build a tool you can use the very next day.
What happens in the session
Less is More is a 90-minute live workshop built around one practical methodology: the Tipping Point People Map. Here's how we build it together.
The Stories We Carry About Scale
Using Mentimeter, we surface what you and the room actually believe about how change spreads, in real time and without judgement. The results almost always surprise people. That surprise is where the work begins.
Tipping Points in the Wild
We work through real examples: Preston City Council, the Civil Rights movement, the referendum on same-sex marriage in Ireland, Spain’s Mondragon Corporation. Not as inspiration but as evidence: what actually made them work, and what that reveals about your own context.
Your Tipping Point People Map
The practical output you build and leave with: who to gather in your specific context, what activities create the depth of connection that changes behaviour over time, and how to recognise when new norms are beginning to take hold.
Why reaching fewer people might be your most powerful strategy.
Complete purchase for Less is More, and build a tool you can use the very next day.
The Science of How Change Actually Travels
We explore why transformative change travels through trusted relationships and shared experience rather than reach alone, and what that means practically for how you spend your time and energy. You leave with the evidence to explain this clearly to your team, community or collaborators.
Your Ecosystem, Honestly Mapped
Using Miro, you map where your strongest relationships already are and where your energy is currently going. Most people find at least one significant shift waiting for them here.
This is for you if
You've read widely, you resonate deeply with community wealth building and regenerative economics, and you're ready to know what applying it actually feels like in practice
You're inside a council, university, or non-profit organisation that keeps pulling back from where you can see it needs to go, and you need the language and the evidence to bring colleagues with you
You're earlier in this work, you've started to see through the surface of how the economy actually operates, and you want a grounded starting point rather than another reading list
You're being asked to demonstrate impact through reach and numbers, and something about those metrics keeps feeling like the wrong measure of the right work
Before
You measure success by reach, attendance, and numbers, because that's the language everyone around you seems to speak.
You sense that going deeper is the right instinct but you don't yet have the evidence to back it up or the words to explain it to anyone who asks.
You have a general sense of who needs to be involved but no clear map of who to gather first, or why.
After
You measure success by the depth of the relationships in your committed core, and you have the science to explain clearly why that matters more.
You know where to focus your energy and you can see the change beginning to compound.
You leave with a Tipping Point People Map built for your specific context, wherever you are in the work.
I’m Heather Thomas, the founder of Together Culture, and I'm so glad you're here.
Whether you found us because something in your work keeps stalling despite your best efforts, or because you can see exactly what needs to change and can't yet find the lever, I want you to know that I understand where you are.
I've spent my career sitting at the intersection of culture and change. I studied history. Worked in cultural strategy, social change and tech for good. I got my MBA in Copenhagen to better understand how the system worked to try and change it. I studied the Nordic Food Movement, opened a cultural hub and wrote a book about how people could connect to their true nature as a part of nature through food culture.
And then one morning, five years ago, I woke up and discovered that my neighbourhood in Cambridge had been sold to a multinational private equity firm thousands of miles away. I lay there scrolling through the news thinking: how on earth did we get here? And what does it actually take to change things?
What I kept returning to was this: real change isn't about fighting for a seat at the table that already exists. To paraphrase the iconic feminist Gloria Steinem, it's about building a new table, with entirely different rules.
That's when Together Culture was born; in Cambridge, one of the most socially unequal cities in the UK. We built methods to get to the root of building a more inclusive and ecological economy: our culture. After all, it's our attitudes, values, and behaviours that limit or expand our reality. If we want complex change to happen, we have no choice but to change our culture.
That’s exciting, because from that point of view you don't have to be a policy wonk to be an economist. Policy wonks don't shape our culture; we all do, each and every day.
And culture, that I know. I'm a social scientist working on my PhD to better understand how culture change at the neighbourhood scale creates the tipping points that make a regenerative economy real.
We’re all economists now. I trust you are ready to stop carrying the resistance alone and start working with the power you already have. So you can build the skills, the tools, and the relationships to make an economy that enables all of life to thrive.
What shifts when you stop trying to reach everyone
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You redefine what success looks like
You start measuring the work by the depth of the conversations happening and the behaviour change emerging from them, whether that's inside an institution, a community, or an initiative you're just beginning to shape
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You can name the strategy clearly
You go into a conversation with a funder, a manager, or a colleague and have the language to explain clearly why your strategy is focused by design, and why that's a strength.
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You see exactly where to put your energy
You look at your map and see where your strongest relationships already are, where you've been spreading energy too thin, and exactly where to redirect. Wherever you are in the work, that clarity changes things.
£37. 90 minutes.
A tool you can use the very next day.
The Tipping Point People Map - built for your specific context, and the behavioural science to explain to anyone who asks why focused, relational strategy is the most efficient path to lasting change.
Less is More.
Why reaching fewer people might be your most powerful strategy.
Complete purchase for Less is More, and build a tool you can use the very next day.
Solidarity pricing available — if cost is a barrier, email us first: heather@togetherculture.com