Consulting
Be brave.
Be changed.

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.

Culture Change

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.

Culture Coaching

As a senior leader sometimes it feels all eyes are on you when it comes to cultural change and transformation. In this situation an external perspective on cultural transformation is often helpful. Our experienced practitioners explore key questions and help you open up practical options.

  • 1.5 hour Cultural Coaching sessions
  • External perspective and supportive challenge
  • Signposting of other resources and sources of information / inspiration
  • Written summary of options / choices

Cultural Immersion

Seeing your organisational culture afresh can help generate new possibilities for change. In a one day session our experienced practitioners introduce you to cultural immersion techniques and spend time applying these within your organisation. Together we then make sense of our findings and think about the practical implications for your organisational change.

  • Introduction to key cultural immersion techniques as a team (up to 8)
  • Applying immersion techniques within your organisation – exploring rituals, routines, symbols, cultural habits and patterns
  • Group sense-making – of the experience of applying the techniques, the findings, and the implications for your organisation

Cultural Audit

Working out where to start with cultural transformation can seem daunting. Our cultural audit helps you to get clear on the questions that need asking. Our consulting team spend time exploring and inquiring into your culture, speaking to both the usual and unusual suspects. In a half day workshop we share and explore our findings and recommendations.

  • Cultural exploration and inquiry on site from experienced consulting team exploring
    • What are your cultural patterns, rituals, symbols, beliefs?
    • What are your people up for and what is getting in the way?
    • What tangible options do you have for shaping the culture?
  • Half-day workshop with senior leadership team – findings, implications, top 3 recommendations, next steps

Strategy Engagement

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.

Senior Team Effectiveness

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.

Organisation Design

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:
  • Identifying the critical choices and trade-offs.
  • Assessing the current model against design principles and tests.
  • Developing and evaluating design choices.
  • Developing transition plans for moving to a new design.
Senior Team Effectiveness
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Organisation Design
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Culture Change
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