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.
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.
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.