The Canadian 2SLGBTQI+ Chamber of Commerce (CGLCC) has given us the opportunity to connect with LGBTQ+ entrepreneurs from across Canada. For our first instalment, we got in touch with Myriane Ouellette of Moncton-based consulting group O Strategies. As Oullette spoke with Wayves, she explained the origins of O Strategies and explored how her identity has shaped her experiences in the industry. As the firm joins the Canadian Gay & Lesbian Chamber of Commerce, Oullette feels like O Strategies is “coming out” to the community — a cause for celebration.
After a stint in corporate consulting, Ouellette felt her career was out of sync with her values. This led Ouellette to found O Strategies, inviting business partner Jason Doiron to join as co-creator just months later. The pair sought to escape corporate convention and craft a community-focussed approach to consulting. “I really wanted to develop a consultancy firm that wasn't a traditional type,” says Ouellette.
To the entrepreneur, these ‘traditional’ types of firms felt detached from their communities. Speaking about her past experience in consulting, Ouellette remarks: “a consultant would come in and prescribe solutions to the organization that they're working with. I always found that it was really cold. There was never continual follow up, or there was never the proper support that organizations needed to really be able to change.”
With O Strategies, Ouellette ensures that people evolve alongside the business. At the firm, that means taking a “human-centred approach” to business.
This type of ‘business-first’ ethos is at odds with both Doiron and Ouellette’s backgrounds, which the latter describes as “rooted in community.” Though they wouldn’t meet until much later, Ouellette and Doiron shared a passion for leadership and community organizing. Ouellette says this began at a young age: “We were both in Scouts for a very long time and we didn't even know it. I was from Manitoba, and [Doiron is] from here in New Brunswick, so we didn't know each other until we were much older,” she explains. “But we did go through scouting most of our youth, just to find connection and community — and [because we] felt a little bit like outcasts, right?”
It's tough to picture Ouellette, with her business savvy and conversational charm, as an outcast. Ouellette credits these traits to Scouts, which gave her these crucial skills for the professional world. “We were already organizing events, facilitating a lot, being exposed to leadership roles that we probably wouldn't be [in a] normal school setting.”
Though Doiron and Ouellette took similar paths, years passed before they intersected, this time as freelancers in New Brunswick. By that point, Ouellette had built a solid foundation in the industry. As a graduate student in Public Administration, Ouellette supported her mother’s work in consulting, where she quickly picked up on the connection between the boardroom and the lecture hall. Though Ouellette found full-time consultant work after graduation, it didn’t align with her personal values; this prompted Ouellette to strike out on her own. Less than a year after founding O Strategies, Ouellette tapped her frequent collaborator Doiron — whom she’d met through her mother's non-profit work — to join O Strategies as a partner. “The rest is history,” Ouellette recalls.
Doiron and Ouellette shared a frustration with consulting — next to words like ‘profit’ and ‘efficiency,’ people become an afterthought. Tangible outcomes matter, to be sure, but not at the cost of employee satisfaction. With O Strategies, Ouellette ensures that people evolve alongside the business. At the firm, that means taking a “human-centred approach” to business.
“Every time you face a wave of change, you have a grief cycle come in, and that's on top of what you're living with. All your layers of identity — who you are, what your background is, [whether] you come in with a series of traumas or life experiences that you live with — you also have to bring them in when you're working. You can't really differentiate your home life and your work life," Ouellette says.
Given their common background, Ouellette and Doiron were a natural fit in the workforce — their collaborative approach is consistent with O Strategies’ motto: by, with, and for. “It's always 'by, with, and for' the communities we're representing,” Ouellette says. “For instance, if we're working with an LGBTQ organization representing many members and defending rights, it's always a co-creative process.”
Traditionally, ‘co-creation’ means that an organization uses consumer input — regarding design, development, product, and/or process — to inform their decisions. For organizations without direct consumers, like schools or social services, consultants seek out the affected community. “It's about bringing in the stakeholders that will be affected, the ones that will be impacted, and co-creating whatever it is — whether that's strategy [or] whether we’re working on a project together — [we] try to define the problem and find solutions,” Ouellette explains.
While typical consultant-client relationships are like a teacher and student, O Strategies’ clients are like partners in a group project — consultant and clients stand on equal footing. Ouellette, for example, is quick to note that she’s not an expert in every field of study, but a “process specialist.” Clients define their goals, and Ouellette finds the path. “We tend to work with many styles of organizations because we focus on the process, not the result. We really work hand in hand with our clients and show them how to get to where they need to be,” she adds.
O Strategies’ clients are like partners in a group project — consultant and clients stand on equal footing.
Navigating duality is second nature to Ouellette: O Strategies does business in English and French from an office in Moncton, though Ouellette herself lives “kind of in the woods.” New Brunswick’s bilingual government motivated Ouellette, a proud francophone, to relocate from Manitoba in 2007. “The idea that we can work in our language of choice, and that we can be fluent in French and English, was really appealing to us,” Ouellette says of her family.
This proved especially useful when O Strategies teamed up with the New Brunswick Department of Education. “In New Brunswick, there's a principle of linguistic duality. The Francophone school divisions and the Anglophone school divisions work together at a macro level, but [they] really do their own thing on the ground,” she says.
“We’ve done a lot of training at the macro level on complex tools for complex problems for system change.” The school divisions have taken the tools to heart, incorporating techniques including open face technology, design thinking, and human centred approaches. “That has transformed their work culture,” Ouellette says. “Before, they had quite a bit of trouble with retention and turnover. It's really changed the way that they're holding meetings or holding space for people around them.”
The project with New Brunswick’s Department of Education is a microcosm of O Strategies' philosophy — Ouellette and Doiron love a holistic approach. Their work bridges the gap between commerce and community with an open-minded, person-to-person focus. “A lot of people do divide the community and the corporate world, [but] I don't see a division there. I don't believe that it really exists, I think it’s something that society constructed,” Ouellette shares.
The project with New Brunswick’s Department of Education is a microcosm of O Strategies' philosophy — Ouellette and Doiron love a holistic approach.
That said, she does acknowledge that O Strategies is unconventional. Instead of a boardroom hierarchy, Ouellette invites clients into a room for circular meetings, which host all participants on equal footing. “You don't see a lot of consultants start off the meeting in a circle,” she laughs, “usually, [they’re sitting around] little roundtables at a hotel and it's pretty dry. But I've done this with some pretty big corporate clients.”
Little changes like these set the stage for bolder, transformative change at the organization. “Our tools and processes might seem a little bit esoteric at first, [but] the more that we stepped into that ‘authentic self,’ the more our work had an impact,” she says. “You get much further when you're able to connect on a deeper level.”
These principles show up at home, too. “In our organization, we're quite horizontal. We use a shared leadership model, so although Jason and I are still the owners of the business, and we make some final decisions, the whole staff is very much part of steering the ship,” Ouellette says. Her appreciation for the staff at O Strategies is tangible — Ouellette is quick to note that the consulting firm would be nothing without its workers. “[They’ve] always been there to support us and ground us.”
As O Strategies joins the CGLCC, Ouellette says the consulting firm is living by its values. “I'm actually bisexual and have always been — I've always known that. But of course, the fact that we're almost members of the CGLCC, it's almost like a ‘coming out’ to the world,” she says. “It was an intentional move for O Strategies to do that. We talk a lot about courageous leadership and authentic leadership, which is part of our value system. We said, ‘well, if we are preaching this to our clients, we need to be true to ourselves as well.’”
