In our consulting practice we help you to have the critical conversations that are needed to explore possibilities, overcome difficulties, and realise opportunities. We’re interested in people, patterns, and processes – especially social ones. People want to be successful and do good work. Our role as consultants is to help you to make this possible.
We believe that there is a strong connection between great leading and great cultures. But we rarely find that cultural change can be managed or planned in conventional terms.
So we help leaders to create a social movement to disrupt and change culturally ingrained patterns of thought and action. We do this by helping people to become aware of how they interpret situations, relate to others and approach their work. We raise awareness as to how these patterns both help and hinder the organisation’s effectiveness. We help leaders to be skilful and conscious in activating and evolving culture, through both formal and informal gestures.
Typically, we use participatory inquiry methods to discover and surface cultural patterns, then use creative ways to hold up a mirror to the organisation. We help to organise change activists to run cultural experiments that are intended to disrupt behavioural patterns and change working practices with the aim of improving effectiveness.
We often support cultural change processes by working with senior teams on their leadership, supporting the redesign of work processes, and holding engagement events to review progress.
Metalogue have experience that helps guide your focus anywhere from the most senior leadership to grassroots employees.
Too often, strategies developed in the boardroom don’t connect with those outside. The most powerful strategies harness the knowledge, creativity, energy and will of the wider organisation. This is the essence of participatory strategy. But it’s easier said than done.
We think that strategic change is a planned endeavour as well as a creative process of discovery. It requires everyone to think about their assumptions, experimentation, experience and choice.
Our approach is to work closely with leadership to design processes that engage people to create strategic change.
This often means involving some unusual suspects in the strategy process. Quite often we run large group events where the strategy can evolve “live”. These can sometimes be hair-raising (for us and for clients) but always worthwhile.
Teams who gather regularly to reflect on their aims, primary task and dynamics are more effective.
Helping senior (and functional) teams to pause and find ways to work more effectively together can make a big difference.
A group of highly competent individuals can be a highly dysfunctional team and we have witnessed too many times the impact that a dysfunctional senior team can have on an organisation. We review team dynamics and provide real time observations to the team that lead to change. We also often provide coaching to individual leaders or the team and we bring in data from stakeholders, from psychometric tools and from clients.
Our clients tell us that helping senior teams to pause and reflect on how they work together always makes a big difference.
All too often, organisation redesign seems to be about moving boxes and people around on hierarchical organisation charts. However, our recent research suggests that this is not always as objective as it seems and decisions are often taken for personal reasons.
Power and politics are often at play at senior levels. Our skill is in managing a structured process that acknowledges interests and motives but encourages senior teams to design their organisation to best deliver on strategy. We help clients work out how to integrate strategic choice, organisation form, key roles, operating units and support roles with their internal cultures while acknowledging all structures have trade-offs and risks.
Our approach is systemic and systematic, but avoids over focus on structure
It involves: