How Klaus Works
Klaus takes a partnership-driven approach that ensures collaborative success from initial discovery through sustainable impact. His process is designed to build authentic trust and address power dynamics explicitly—particularly important when bridging pharmaceutical and diagnostics industry objectives with community health needs.
Discovery & Partnership Formation | Initial conversations to understand your goals, context, and constraints. Klaus ensures alignment on values, approach, and desired outcomes before formal engagement. For pharmaceutical and diagnostics partnerships, this phase includes explicit discussion of community concerns, historical context, and equitable benefit-sharing frameworks—building trust from the outset rather than treating it as an implementation detail.
Strategic Design | Collaborative development of work plans, timelines, and success metrics. Klaus brings expertise and proven approaches while adapting to your unique situation. For industry-community partnerships, strategic design includes governance structures that give communities meaningful decision-making power, not just advisory roles—recognizing that authentic partnership requires sharing power, not just seeking input.
Implementation Support | Hands-on facilitation, strategic guidance, and problem-solving throughout the engagement. Klaus remains actively involved, not just delivering recommendations and disappearing. For pharmaceutical and diagnostics partnerships, this includes navigating regulatory environments, building sustainable commercial models, and integrating products into community health systems.
Knowledge Transfer | Building your team's capacity for sustainability. Klaus documents processes, trains staff, and creates resources you can use long-term. This includes capacity building for trust-building and authentic community engagement—skills that extend beyond single projects to transform how organizations approach all partnerships.
Evaluation & Learning | Measuring impact, extracting lessons, and translating findings into actionable next steps or broader dissemination. Klaus's evaluation framework assesses both health outcomes and commercial sustainability, recognizing that industry partnerships require demonstrable business value alongside social impact. He also measures trust-building success, and matches evaluation to the depth of change being pursued: performance indicators for improvement work, sense-making and judgment for transformation work
The Thinking Behind This
This way of working stands in a long tradition. Edgar Schein called it process consultation, the idea that the helper's job is not to hand over expert answers but to help the client system see itself clearly and build its own capacity to act. Schein's later work on humble inquiry, the discipline of asking instead of telling, describes the difference between coalitions that hold and coalitions that stall. Partners who are told what to do comply politely and drift. Partners who are asked real questions, and whose answers visibly shape the work, stay.
The Danish supersetting research reached the same conclusion from the field. A 3-year follow-up of Project SoL found that when the coordinator role ended, coordinated action across settings fell apart even though every partner stayed motivated. Coordination is not administration. It is a continuous act of inquiry, and it is the part of this work Klaus never delegates.
Mark Cabaj's recent work for the Tamarack Institute sharpens a distinction that runs through every engagement: is the goal to make an existing system work better, or to rework the logic it is built on? Both are legitimate, but they run on different clocks and answer to different evidence. Improvement is planned and cumulative, and can be judged against agreed indicators within a strategy cycle. Transformation is nonlinear and contested, and its early progress shows up in shifted narratives, new relationships, and changed lived experience, long before the indicators move. Some of Klaus's work is transformation in exactly this sense: congregations as settings where health is produced, not venues where programs are delivered. Grading that kind of change by improvement's yardstick is how promising work gets quietly defunded. So Klaus puts the question on the table at the start, and matches strategy, time horizon, and evaluation to the depth of change actually being pursued.
Ready to Explore Working Together?
Klaus welcomes inquiries from organizations committed to health equity and collaborative innovation. Whether you have a fully formed project or an emerging idea, initial conversations help determine if there's a good fit.
Klaus is particularly interested in partnerships that:
Require authentic community engagement in underserved communities
Seek to build trust with populations skeptical of industry involvement
Value equitable power-sharing and community voice in decision-making
Aim for both commercial sustainability and health equity outcomes
Are willing to address historical harms and power dynamics explicitly