Our approach
What if your team could see what's already going on, and talk about it honestly?
What's already going on
Those conditions show up through one of three doorways: strategy, leadership or culture. They look like separate problems. They're one system, which is why fixing one on its own rarely lasts.
Strategy
What usually sits behind it
A plan written for the organisation rather than built with it, and forces nobody has mapped that quietly pull it off course.
What changes
Your team builds the future it wants together, so the plan is theirs and they act on it.
Leadership
What usually sits behind it
Each leader running their own part well, with no shared picture of how the parts push on each other.
What changes
Leaders see how their parts push on each other, and start thinking as one team.
Culture
What usually sits behind it
Change announced to people rather than made with them, so the old patterns return as soon as attention moves on.
What changes
People make the meaning themselves, so the change holds when attention moves on.
If your problem is technical and the answer is already known, you don't need us.
How the work usually runs
Every engagement is shaped around your organisation, but most follow these five steps. The first starts from the symptom you can see and finds the pattern behind it.
We talk with you and a few of your leaders, and use the Strategic Pattern Diagnostic, to find the pattern behind the symptom you came in with.
You leave with A clear view of what is technical and what is systemic, before anyone commits to a programme.
Typically You and a few senior colleagues: a conversation each, plus the 20-minute diagnostic.
Together we decide who needs to be in the room, which questions matter most, and over what time.
You leave with A design that fits your organisation and your calendar, not a standard package.
Typically You as sponsor, with us, over two or three conversations.
Your senior team builds its vision, maps the forces acting on it and connects them into one model, then thinks together about what it shows.
You leave with One shared picture of the system, the few points where action matters most, and a vision the team has built and owns.
Typically Your senior team, together, for one to three days.
The team chooses the few places where a small change will shift the whole system, and designs small tests instead of a big programme.
You leave with A short list of experiments, each with an owner and a clear question it should answer.
Typically The same team, at the end of the workshop or soon after.
You run the experiments, return to the model to see what the system did, and decide what next. Then round again.
You leave with Evidence of what works in your organisation, and growing capability to keep going without us.
Typically The owner of each experiment, a review with us, and your own facilitators if you choose to train them.
Inside step 3
Data scientists and economists, from junior staff to board level, built their vision and the system around it, one stage at a time. The method is the SeriousWork Systems Thinking Model©, which turns Donella Meadows' definition of a system into five stages a team can build.
1Each person's vision, combined into one
2The forces that help or block it
3Organised around the vision
4Connected: where influence flows
5Re-Vision©: the vision refined"He took a group of 28 smart, diverse, yet also critical data scientists and economists ... and led us to a unified vision for our Data Science practice."Dr Sebastian Wernicke, Partner, Oxera
The question your colleagues will ask
It is the most serious thing in the room.
Senior teams are fluent in slides and strategy papers, and that fluency is part of the problem. It lets assumptions pass unexamined, and it lets the most confident voice set the direction.
Building removes that cover. Every person puts their own thinking on the table, in a form others can see and question. Disagreement becomes something the team can point at, not someone it has to confront. And for the first time, the whole system sits in front of the whole team at once.
The method was never designed as play. LEGO® Serious Play® was developed in the 1990s by Johan Roos and Bart Victor, then professors at IMD in Switzerland, to help managers describe, create and challenge their views of their business. Professor Victor wrote the foreword to our book, The Systems Synergy.
Designed for change that lasts
Most change fades because it was done to people. Psychologists Edward Deci and Richard Ryan showed that people sustain change of their own accord when three needs are met: autonomy, relatedness and competence. Every step of our work is designed to meet all three.
Autonomy
Your team builds its direction rather than receiving it, so it owns what it built.
Relatedness
Dialogue around the models makes the undiscussable discussable, and that changes how the team works on a hard day.
Competence
Your people learn the discipline of seeing the system, so they can keep doing it without us.
Who is in the room
You won't meet a partner at the pitch and a junior team on the day. Every engagement is led by one of us, with associates from our network where the scale of the work needs them.
Founder
Has designed and led strategic work for senior teams since 2000, for organisations including Google, HSBC and Pfizer. Developed the SeriousWork Systems Thinking Model© and wrote The Systems Synergy.
Director of Learning and Innovation
A learning designer with 20 years' experience. Designs the workshops and programmes behind much of our client work, for capability that lasts, not just a good day.
Ways to begin
Each option runs the same five steps. What changes is how many times you go round the cycle, and how much of it your own people learn to run.
Option 1 Buy
Organisations that want to see it work before committing further.
Steps 1 to 4 once, with a follow-up session to start step 5.
Who runs it We do.
Option 2 Hybrid
Organisations ready to commit, but wanting to invest in stages.
The whole cycle, over six months.
Who runs it We do, with your people learning alongside.
Option 3 Build
Organisations facing significant systemic complexity that needs sustained capability.
The cycle repeated, until your people run it themselves.
Who runs it Your people, with us on the highest-stakes work.
We often work alongside a client's existing consultancy or programme partner, as design partner and co-facilitator.
Investment depends on scope and scale. The Executive Brief sets out typical ranges, and we will give you a clear figure after a first conversation.
The 20-minute Strategic Pattern Diagnostic shows which patterns are strongest in your organisation and which way to begin suits them. Or simply talk to us.