My Approach to Helping You

I work with you and your team to build a customized approach to help you implement your initiatives and improve performance more effectively.  Whether it’s on a team by team basis beginning in one unit of your company, or in an enterprise-wide engagement; or whether your focused on organic growth or growth via acquisitions, the approach will help you refine definition of your aspirations and strategy and re-design the organization to be fit for purpose

Behavior Analysis

Each engagement begins with a Behavior Analysis. The analysis will assess your company’s current behavioral patterns, underlying drivers of those current patterns, and the behavioral risks, based on the current design of your company, threatening achievement of your strategy and growth initiatives.  And it will serve as the foundation for designing the approach to improve your company’s performance.  You wouldn’t think of not conducting a financial analysis, legal analysis, market analysis, or competitive analysis when considering a new acquisition or strategic initiative; the behavior analysis is equally critical.

Much of the design activity and the discovery that underlies it will take place during customized workshops with intact teams and blended working groups from across your company.  During the workshops, processes and tools will be used  to help people practice and learn how to think, converse, challenge, explore, innovate, decide, and act together more effectively; these are skills that they will take back to their own teams, workplaces, and families with them.

We have all participated in meetings that began with good intentions but ended with confusion, superficial or false commitments, watered-down compromise, skepticism, and a diversity of interpretations of the nature of original problem, of what was actually discussed, and of what was agreed.  And life goes on without much lasting change.

To avoid this, Design Workshops use the Structured Visual Thinking (see Contact | Partners, Group Partners) process to improve the quality of the conversation, inspire full participation, and ultimately create shared meaning, commitment, and better execution.

I assume the answers to your business challenges already exist within your company and waiting to emerge.  All it typically takes is a process to reconnect the expertise across the functions of your company.  Connecting your people and their experience and expertise enables more powerful solutions that a broader portion of the organization can commit to and implement effectively. The process of workshops and using blended work groups draws the answers out by bringing the diverse perspectives and expertise from your company’s functions together.  Diverse participants will help create realistic ‘maps’ of your organizational system and its value chain, enabling pinpoint targeting of improvement opportunities.

I use a data-driven process that enables an accurate diagnosis of your company’s health and leverage points, the best choices about designing and implementing interventions to improve health, and for monitoring real-time progress in implementing design changes and changing behavior.  With the data, improvement progress will be fully transparent to the leaders in the company.  You make your strategic choices based on careful data analysis; your performance improvement approach should be as equally rigorous.

A fond saying of my graduate school mentor, D. Chris Anderson, “Without data, you’re just another schmuck with an opinion.”

I will help you redesign and build the systems and structures that define your way of working to get results.  At the same time, I can work with your team to build the fitness of your leaders, managers, and teams to ensure solutions are lasting.  Many business performance improvement programs fail because they emphasize either the ‘hard side’ of an issue – the financial, technical, or operational stuff – or the ‘soft side’ – training, coaching, HR systems – but rarely both together.  As we together address your business challenges and improve performance, you will also build the capability of your leaders and managers to guide, embed, and sustain the change – and address performance problems and deal with uncertainty more effectively in the future.

Fitness programs to improve capability utilize action – / experiential learning approaches to best suit highly professional, experienced adults.

I’m driven to get results for you, as quickly and as sustainably as possible.  I’m not interested in being a cost-burden to your company;  I am flexible in my fee structure to suit the needs of your own financial model, and working predominantly on a success-fee basis.

I work within a network of trusted partners (see Contact menu).  This creates several advantages for you, including:

• Broadening my capability to offer you solutions that will meet your needs.
• Extending my geographic reach.
• Minimizing language and cultural gaps.
• Eliminating the need to carry highly experienced experts as overhead on my staff, and therefore passing on the savings to you.

I am driven to deliver you a significant Return on your Investment in my services.

Next: Individual Programs