About Bright Pilots
We’re here to help you and your team tackle your complex challenges, with better strategy, facilitation and visualisation.
What drives us?
The average person will spend 90,000 hours at work over a lifetime. A lot of those hours will be spent with others, trying to get our best work done.
There’s too much at stake, and too much great work to do, to waste those hours in default thinking, default communication, and default ways of working.
Useless meetings. Slippery stakeholders. Business jargon. Administrivia. Office birthdays (OK, except for the cake. We like cake.)
We believe in the power of facilitation, design and visual thinking to help teams tackle complex challenges, and do their best work together. And we believe the way we can make our best impact is to help others boost their skills in these areas, so that they can boost their impact.
This is what we want to do with our 90,000 hours.
Who are we?
Bright Pilots is a collective of facilitators, solopreneurs, cageshakers and changemakers who train and coach others in the skills we all need to thrive in the modern world of work:
- Creativity and problem-solving
- Drawing and visual communication
- Wrangling ambiguity and complexity
- Collaboration, team performance and culture
We do this through facilitating, visualising, training and coaching.
Feel free to download and use the same resources we use, for free.
Ben Crothers
Principal Facilitator
Ben enjoys helping teams solve tough challenges through facilitation and visualisation. Working with start-ups and large tech (Atlassian, Tyro, Canva, Zip), as well as in the finance sector, government, universities and non-profits has given him deep practical experience with a wide variety of strategy, innovation, and decision-making methods.
Ben is one of the original creators of the much-loved Atlassian Team Playbook, and has written several books, including Presto Sketching, Draw in 4, and 50 Remote-Friendly Icebreakers.
Dreu Harrison
Principal at Weft Strategy
Dreu helps clients actually integrate their strategies, rather than just trying to bolt them on to existing BAU. He is skilled at interweaving plans, solutions, stakeholders and services through conversation and visualisation. Leaders make decisions and tell stories that align and move people much more easily, with Dreu in the room.
Dreu is Principal at Weft Strategy, and also lectures in Design at the University of Technology Sydney.
James de Vries
Design Leader
You’ll always find James excelling at the tricky intersection of design, strategy and innovation. He helps organisations not only realise actionable enterprise value through design, but also communicate that value, as part of transformation strategy.
Previously Creative Director at Harvard Business Review, James is Director of the design firm De Luxe & Associates, and a master of brand storytelling.
What’s with the “Bright Pilots” name?
Today’s working world is a lot more unpredictable than we’d like it to be. When things are predictable, businesses can focus on efficiency and productivity. But when things aren’t so predictable, that focus doesn’t always work.
Think about what pilots do: they read the weather conditions, help navigate the way, take people through the fog and turbulence of that unpredictability, and get them safely to where they need to be. Every organisation needs people who are great at doing exactly that. And in today’s times, now more than ever.
Are you one of these ‘pilots’?
Are you a team leader, manager, program manager, project manager, or someone who loves enabling your team? We want to help you to have a bigger, brighter impact, beyond the regular flightpath of your job description.
If that’s something that excites you, we should talk.
You’re in good company
Here are just a few of the organisations that Bright Pilots has been privileged to work with:
