MIT Sloan School of Management
RealTalk@Sloan brought students, staff, and faculty into recorded small-group conversations on MIT’s Values, with insights and voices organized in a privacy preserving portal to guide reflection and institutional improvement.
Read on to learn more about how Cortico worked with MIT Sloan.
Cortico partnered with MIT Sloan School of Management to support RealTalk@Sloan, an initiative of the MIT Center for Constructive Communication designed to strengthen how the Sloan community listens, learns, and makes decisions together.
Challenge: Building a New Communication Infrastructure at MIT Sloan
MIT Sloan wanted a reliable way to understand how students, staff, and faculty are experiencing the school’s values in daily life, not just through surveys or big forums. The goal was to create a space where people could share lived experience openly, surface what should be celebrated and what causes friction, and make that understanding visible to both the community and school leadership
Solution: Transforming Conversations into Community Insights
RealTalk@Sloan used Cortico’s approach to host facilitated small group conversations, typically 60 to 75 minutes long with up to six participants and two trained facilitators. In these sessions, community members reflected on Excellence and Curiosity, Openness and Respect, and Belonging and Community, sharing stories about where MIT’s values are felt strongly, where they fall short, and what needs to change for the future. Conversations were recorded with participants’ permission, transcribed on Cortico’s platform, and then analyzed through a human-led sensemaking process that tagged highlights by value areas and emerging sub-themes.
Results: Driving Change and Community Engagement at MIT Sloan
The outcome is a password protected conversation portal that serves as a living, privacy preserving repository of voices across Sloan. Community members can explore approved highlights, filter by value, prompt, and group, and see summaries of key themes that emerged. For Sloan leaders, the portal provides a grounded view of community climate and culture, helping identify areas for adjustment and action while making the same evidence available to the broader community. Over time, RealTalk@Sloan has become an ongoing listening infrastructure that supports transparency, trust, and more responsive decision making.
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