Renga Consulting Services, Inc.
Renga, meaning “linked poem,” began over seven hundred years ago in Japan to encourage the collaborative composition of poems. Poets worked in pairs or small groups, taking turns composing the alternating three-line and two-line stanzas. Linked together, renga were often hundreds of lines long, though the favored length was a 36-line form called a kasen. To create a renga, one poet writes the first stanza, which is three lines long with a total of seventeen syllables. The next poet adds the second stanza, a couplet with seven syllables per line. The third stanza repeats the structure of the first and the fourth repeats the second, alternating in this pattern until the poem’s end.[1]
Alane calls her consulting services Renga because she brings a collaborative approach to her consulting work, whether it is one-on-one executive coaching, team building, strategic planning, teaching, or diversity, equity and inclusion training. She gives the client or team the space to describe what they are seeking and, with an alternating process of active listening, adding suggestions, and letting the client link their new insights to the discussion. By the end of the process, people come away seeing their choices, challenges, possibilities, strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities, in a clear manner with a structured work plan to reach their desired outcomes.
[1] https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/text/renga-poetic-form