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Case studies
Selected Work
Selected Work
These five case studies show how QIMA turns complex challenges into clear decisions, durable systems, and public-facing work. Each traces the challenge, our approach, and the impact.
These five case studies show how QIMA turns complex challenges into clear decisions, durable systems, and public-facing work. Each traces the challenge, our approach, and the impact.
These five case studies show how QIMA turns complex challenges into clear decisions, durable systems, and public-facing work. Each traces the challenge, our approach, and the impact.
ARTS PRODUCTION + PROGRAM DESIGN
Building an Artist-Development Platform Beyond Higher Education
$1M over three years · 100+ artists · 45+ new works · 15 countries · Three-institution partnership
QIMA’s role: Program architecture, curriculum design, executive and creative production, faculty alignment, partnership development, fundraising strategy, marketing, recruitment, and festival production.
The Challenge
Exceptional artistic training does not always prepare musicians to build sustainable creative lives. Emerging artists often leave higher education with deep technical ability but limited support in developing projects, building ensembles, navigating partnerships, communicating their work, and creating viable careers. After nearly three decades as an internationally recognized, GRAMMY Award-winning ensemble, Eighth Blackbird held significant knowledge about contemporary artistic practice, collaboration, and professional development. That experience had not yet been translated into a coherent artist-development platform capable of supporting an international and interdisciplinary community.
Our Approach
QIMA executed a year-long process of listening, research, and program development with former Creative Lab artists, faculty, arts leaders, and industry partners. We translated Eighth Blackbird’s institutional and professional knowledge into an intensive curriculum connecting artistic experimentation with collaboration, production, entrepreneurship, and long-term career development. Designed for individual artists, ensembles, composers, and interdisciplinary collaborators working beyond conventional academic structures, the platform required coordination across curriculum, faculty, fundraising, marketing, recruitment, partnerships, and production.
QIMA developed and managed a major partnership among Eighth Blackbird, Yerkes Observatory, and the Athenaeum Center for Thought & Culture, creating a shared structure in which artistic practice, place, and institutional capacity could reinforce one another. Faculty and collaborators included leading artists such as Jonathan Bailey Holland and Ann Hamilton.
The Impact
The work grew into an approximately $1 million, three-year artist-development platform supported through multi-year funding and a partnership among Eighth Blackbird, Yerkes Observatory, and the Athenaeum Center for Thought & Culture. The platform engaged more than 100 artists from 15 countries and supported the development and presentation of more than 45 new works. It created sustained opportunities for artists to deepen their creative practices, strengthen their professional capacities, and build relationships beyond higher education.
The cycle culminated in the inaugural Eyrie Festival in Chicago, bringing the international Creative Lab network into a public-facing program of performances, gatherings, and interdisciplinary exchange. The project transformed a successful residency into a durable artist-development platform, a global creative community, and a repeatable model for cross-institutional cultural production.
For more information, visit: 8bbcreativelab.org
QIMA’s role: Program architecture, curriculum design, executive and creative production, faculty alignment, partnership development, fundraising strategy, marketing, recruitment, and festival production.
The Challenge
Exceptional artistic training does not always prepare musicians to build sustainable creative lives. Emerging artists often leave higher education with deep technical ability but limited support in developing projects, building ensembles, navigating partnerships, communicating their work, and creating viable careers. After nearly three decades as an internationally recognized, GRAMMY Award-winning ensemble, Eighth Blackbird held significant knowledge about contemporary artistic practice, collaboration, and professional development. That experience had not yet been translated into a coherent artist-development platform capable of supporting an international and interdisciplinary community.
Our Approach
QIMA executed a year-long process of listening, research, and program development with former Creative Lab artists, faculty, arts leaders, and industry partners. We translated Eighth Blackbird’s institutional and professional knowledge into an intensive curriculum connecting artistic experimentation with collaboration, production, entrepreneurship, and long-term career development. Designed for individual artists, ensembles, composers, and interdisciplinary collaborators working beyond conventional academic structures, the platform required coordination across curriculum, faculty, fundraising, marketing, recruitment, partnerships, and production.
QIMA developed and managed a major partnership among Eighth Blackbird, Yerkes Observatory, and the Athenaeum Center for Thought & Culture, creating a shared structure in which artistic practice, place, and institutional capacity could reinforce one another. Faculty and collaborators included leading artists such as Jonathan Bailey Holland and Ann Hamilton.
The Impact
The work grew into an approximately $1 million, three-year artist-development platform supported through multi-year funding and a partnership among Eighth Blackbird, Yerkes Observatory, and the Athenaeum Center for Thought & Culture. The platform engaged more than 100 artists from 15 countries and supported the development and presentation of more than 45 new works. It created sustained opportunities for artists to deepen their creative practices, strengthen their professional capacities, and build relationships beyond higher education.
The cycle culminated in the inaugural Eyrie Festival in Chicago, bringing the international Creative Lab network into a public-facing program of performances, gatherings, and interdisciplinary exchange. The project transformed a successful residency into a durable artist-development platform, a global creative community, and a repeatable model for cross-institutional cultural production.
For more information, visit: 8bbcreativelab.org
CIVIC PRODUCTION + COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT
Turning Community Listening into Statewide Cultural Programming
Three-year statewide initiative · Community-led performances · Documentary and broadcast media · MPR and Star Tribune coverage
QIMA’s role: Statewide program design, partnership development, community engagement, local coordination, communications, event production, media strategy, and facilitated public dialogue.
The Challenge
Statewide civic initiatives can easily become generic, extractive, or disconnected from the communities they intend to serve. Across Minnesota, communities were navigating distinct histories, identities, tensions, and aspirations that could not be represented through one predetermined performance or public-engagement model. The challenge was to create a statewide cultural initiative with a coherent structure while allowing each community’s knowledge, humor, language, and lived experience to shape the final work.
Our Approach
Working with the Minnesota Humanities Center and Danger Boat Productions, QIMA helped develop and coordinate a community-centered process connecting local partnership building, listening, public conversation, original performance, and media documentation. The work included identifying and supporting host communities, building relationships with local leaders and organizations, coordinating communications, gathering community stories, and translating what was heard into public programming. Rather than arriving with a finished production, the team used facilitated conversations and local research to create performances responsive to each place.
QIMA held the strategic and producing dimensions of the initiative together: partnership development, community engagement, event planning, communications, program coordination, media strategy, and the practical systems required to move from listening to a public cultural experience.
The Impact
Sketches of Minnesota created a repeatable statewide model in which community knowledge became the source material for public performance and dialogue. Each gathering allowed participants to see local experiences reflected through humor, storytelling, facilitated conversation, and shared civic space. Over three years, the initiative expanded through live events, documentary work, radio programming, and dozens of media captures, with coverage from MPR and the Star Tribune. This extended the project beyond individual performances and created a broader public archive of community experience.
The project strengthened relationships between statewide institutions and local communities while demonstrating that civic engagement can be rigorous, culturally specific, and artistically compelling. It created a model for turning listening into action: beginning with community experience and ending with public work shaped by the people it was intended to serve.
For more information, visit: Minnesota Humanities Center
QIMA’s role: Statewide program design, partnership development, community engagement, local coordination, communications, event production, media strategy, and facilitated public dialogue.
The Challenge
Statewide civic initiatives can easily become generic, extractive, or disconnected from the communities they intend to serve. Across Minnesota, communities were navigating distinct histories, identities, tensions, and aspirations that could not be represented through one predetermined performance or public-engagement model. The challenge was to create a statewide cultural initiative with a coherent structure while allowing each community’s knowledge, humor, language, and lived experience to shape the final work.
Our Approach
Working with the Minnesota Humanities Center and Danger Boat Productions, QIMA helped develop and coordinate a community-centered process connecting local partnership building, listening, public conversation, original performance, and media documentation. The work included identifying and supporting host communities, building relationships with local leaders and organizations, coordinating communications, gathering community stories, and translating what was heard into public programming. Rather than arriving with a finished production, the team used facilitated conversations and local research to create performances responsive to each place.
QIMA held the strategic and producing dimensions of the initiative together: partnership development, community engagement, event planning, communications, program coordination, media strategy, and the practical systems required to move from listening to a public cultural experience.
The Impact
Sketches of Minnesota created a repeatable statewide model in which community knowledge became the source material for public performance and dialogue. Each gathering allowed participants to see local experiences reflected through humor, storytelling, facilitated conversation, and shared civic space. Over three years, the initiative expanded through live events, documentary work, radio programming, and dozens of media captures, with coverage from MPR and the Star Tribune. This extended the project beyond individual performances and created a broader public archive of community experience.
The project strengthened relationships between statewide institutions and local communities while demonstrating that civic engagement can be rigorous, culturally specific, and artistically compelling. It created a model for turning listening into action: beginning with community experience and ending with public work shaped by the people it was intended to serve.
For more information, visit: Minnesota Humanities Center
EXECUTIVE ADVISING + BEHAVIORAL SYSTEMS
Scaling Leadership Through Behavioral Design
AI coaching MVP · Stakeholder research · Rapid prototyping · User testing
QIMA’s role: Product strategy, behavioral design, stakeholder research, prototyping, and user testing.
The Challenge
Community organizing is often driven by election cycles, breaking news, and legislative moments. These periods create urgency, but rarely establish the consistent habits required for long-term civic engagement. Traditional one-to-one coaching also demands significant staff time, making high-quality support difficult and expensive to scale.
Our Approach
QIMA explored how an AI-supported platform could extend high-quality coaching beyond one-to-one relationships. Rather than creating another information tool, we designed a behavioral-coaching system grounded in habit formation, behavioral science, and leadership development. The process included stakeholder interviews, research into emerging AI capabilities, rapid prototyping, and multiple rounds of user testing focused on what would actually encourage sustained engagement.
The Impact
The work produced a successful MVP demonstrating a new model for scalable civic-leadership development. By shifting coaching from episodic intervention toward daily practice, the platform created opportunities for earlier engagement while reducing reliance on resource-intensive staff support.
QIMA’s role: Product strategy, behavioral design, stakeholder research, prototyping, and user testing.
The Challenge
Community organizing is often driven by election cycles, breaking news, and legislative moments. These periods create urgency, but rarely establish the consistent habits required for long-term civic engagement. Traditional one-to-one coaching also demands significant staff time, making high-quality support difficult and expensive to scale.
Our Approach
QIMA explored how an AI-supported platform could extend high-quality coaching beyond one-to-one relationships. Rather than creating another information tool, we designed a behavioral-coaching system grounded in habit formation, behavioral science, and leadership development. The process included stakeholder interviews, research into emerging AI capabilities, rapid prototyping, and multiple rounds of user testing focused on what would actually encourage sustained engagement.
The Impact
The work produced a successful MVP demonstrating a new model for scalable civic-leadership development. By shifting coaching from episodic intervention toward daily practice, the platform created opportunities for earlier engagement while reducing reliance on resource-intensive staff support.
EXECUTIVE ADVISING + ORGANIZATIONAL SYSTEMS
Scaling a National Organizing Network
20 state chapters · Unified membership infrastructure · Tens of thousands of members
QIMA’s role: Organizational strategy, CRM and membership-platform implementation, digital organizing, audience segmentation, communications strategy, and leadership coaching.
The Challenge
A rapidly growing national organizing network with 20 state chapters lacked the shared systems needed to support sustainable growth. Membership data was fragmented across disconnected platforms, organizing practices varied between states, and leaders had limited visibility into which strategies were driving participation and long-term base building. Without a unified approach to data, communications, and digital organizing, the network struggled to measure impact, identify opportunities, and scale successful practices.
Our Approach
QIMA partnered with organizational leadership to strengthen both the network’s technical infrastructure and its organizing strategy. We identified and implemented a shared CRM and membership platform that allowed teams to track engagement consistently across all 20 state chapters. Alongside the technology, we coached organizing leaders in digital strategy, audience segmentation, communications, volunteer engagement, and conversion optimization. By combining systems design with leadership development, we equipped teams to make more informed decisions and move people from initial interest toward sustained participation.
The Impact
The organization established a unified membership infrastructure that improved visibility and enabled more consistent, data-informed decision-making across the network. Organizing leaders strengthened their digital-engagement practices, improved conversion across key pathways, and expanded the organization’s base by tens of thousands of members.
QIMA’s role: Organizational strategy, CRM and membership-platform implementation, digital organizing, audience segmentation, communications strategy, and leadership coaching.
The Challenge
A rapidly growing national organizing network with 20 state chapters lacked the shared systems needed to support sustainable growth. Membership data was fragmented across disconnected platforms, organizing practices varied between states, and leaders had limited visibility into which strategies were driving participation and long-term base building. Without a unified approach to data, communications, and digital organizing, the network struggled to measure impact, identify opportunities, and scale successful practices.
Our Approach
QIMA partnered with organizational leadership to strengthen both the network’s technical infrastructure and its organizing strategy. We identified and implemented a shared CRM and membership platform that allowed teams to track engagement consistently across all 20 state chapters. Alongside the technology, we coached organizing leaders in digital strategy, audience segmentation, communications, volunteer engagement, and conversion optimization. By combining systems design with leadership development, we equipped teams to make more informed decisions and move people from initial interest toward sustained participation.
The Impact
The organization established a unified membership infrastructure that improved visibility and enabled more consistent, data-informed decision-making across the network. Organizing leaders strengthened their digital-engagement practices, improved conversion across key pathways, and expanded the organization’s base by tens of thousands of members.
EXECUTIVE ADVISING + LEADERSHIP DEVELOPMENT
Turning Leadership Theory into Transformative Practice
Two major residencies in Italy · International cohorts · European financial-sector leaders · Cross-sector national network
QIMA’s role: Residency architecture, curriculum design, adaptive-leadership coaching, experiential facilitation, cohort development, institutional coordination, and program launch.
The Challenge
Leadership development is often delivered as abstract instruction, separated from the conflicts, relationships, institutional pressures, and questions of purpose that shape how people actually lead. The Adriano Olivetti Leadership Institute sought to create a more immersive model for emerging leaders from different countries, sectors, and institutional contexts. Participants needed more than conventional training: they needed a sustained environment in which they could examine authority, conflict, responsibility, identity, and personal purpose through practice.
Our Approach
Drawing on experience coaching participants in Harvard Kennedy School’s Adaptive Leadership program, QIMA developed a residential learning structure designed for international cohorts and led two major residencies in Italy.
The program combined adaptive-leadership frameworks with experiential exercises, facilitated reflection, group process, and real-world case analysis. Participants practiced remaining purposeful under pressure, engaging conflict without avoiding it, distinguishing technical problems from adaptive challenges, and leading within complex systems.
QIMA also coached emerging leaders working within financial institutions across Europe and helped create a learning environment capable of holding differences in nationality, profession, authority, and institutional culture.
The work extended across Italy through relationships with leaders and participants in healthcare, higher education, finance, and organizations serving refugee communities. QIMA translated this broad network into a coherent participant journey, facilitation structure, curriculum, and repeatable residency model.
The Impact
QIMA designed and delivered two major international residencies that established a practice-based model of leadership development centered on conflict, purpose, group dynamics, and applied learning.
Participants developed stronger frameworks for understanding organizational systems, exercising authority, working across difference, and leading amid uncertainty. The international cohort structure also created relationships across sectors that rarely learn together, connecting leaders in finance, medicine, education, and refugee-serving institutions.
The residency model continued beyond its initial launch and contributed to the Institute’s broader leadership programming across Italy. What began as an intensive learning experience became a foundation for developing reflective, values-driven leaders across institutions and national contexts.
For more information, visit: Olivetti Leadership Institute
QIMA’s role: Residency architecture, curriculum design, adaptive-leadership coaching, experiential facilitation, cohort development, institutional coordination, and program launch.
The Challenge
Leadership development is often delivered as abstract instruction, separated from the conflicts, relationships, institutional pressures, and questions of purpose that shape how people actually lead. The Adriano Olivetti Leadership Institute sought to create a more immersive model for emerging leaders from different countries, sectors, and institutional contexts. Participants needed more than conventional training: they needed a sustained environment in which they could examine authority, conflict, responsibility, identity, and personal purpose through practice.
Our Approach
Drawing on experience coaching participants in Harvard Kennedy School’s Adaptive Leadership program, QIMA developed a residential learning structure designed for international cohorts and led two major residencies in Italy.
The program combined adaptive-leadership frameworks with experiential exercises, facilitated reflection, group process, and real-world case analysis. Participants practiced remaining purposeful under pressure, engaging conflict without avoiding it, distinguishing technical problems from adaptive challenges, and leading within complex systems.
QIMA also coached emerging leaders working within financial institutions across Europe and helped create a learning environment capable of holding differences in nationality, profession, authority, and institutional culture.
The work extended across Italy through relationships with leaders and participants in healthcare, higher education, finance, and organizations serving refugee communities. QIMA translated this broad network into a coherent participant journey, facilitation structure, curriculum, and repeatable residency model.
The Impact
QIMA designed and delivered two major international residencies that established a practice-based model of leadership development centered on conflict, purpose, group dynamics, and applied learning.
Participants developed stronger frameworks for understanding organizational systems, exercising authority, working across difference, and leading amid uncertainty. The international cohort structure also created relationships across sectors that rarely learn together, connecting leaders in finance, medicine, education, and refugee-serving institutions.
The residency model continued beyond its initial launch and contributed to the Institute’s broader leadership programming across Italy. What began as an intensive learning experience became a foundation for developing reflective, values-driven leaders across institutions and national contexts.
For more information, visit: Olivetti Leadership Institute