Are you looking to reinvent your business?
Assisting oganisattions and entreprises seeking to reinvent themselves.
- What can you do to transform your organisation to be more adaptable, more sustainable, more innovative, more engaging or more client-oriented?
- Why should you encourage a change culture and an inventive spirit across your organisation?
- How can you generate full staff engagemennt without your interventions actually stifling it?
I help small to medium sized organisations reinvent themselves, adopt new working practices (such as Lean, Agile, Responsive, Sociocratic, Teal, Conscious, Sustainable, Beyond Budget, B-Corp, or Employee Owned) and shift from the mechanical business model to a 21st century organic one.
The world is changing rapidly, it is far more complex, ambiguous and unpredictable. Consequently the business model of predict and control, plan and budget, command and execute is no longer working. A far more organic, adaptable and emergent form of organisation is needed which fully engages the diversity of the workforce. The successful organisations of the future are those that manage to turn themselves into thriving communities of innovation.
Yet many organisations are "stuck" in the old paradigm. Many find they can no longer cope or adapt to the new world, that their way of working is no longer working as well as it used to. Moreover the workforce is increasingly disengaged, just at a time when engagement and innovation are most needed.
The companies that find themselves in this predicament know they need to change, but they don't know what they need to change to, nor how. Some may have heard of, or even tried to apply, new approaches (like agile, lean, responsive, etc. as listed above). There is a myriad of new approaches - which should they choose? And even if they do know where they want to head towards, they have no idea how to get there, how to make the transition.
It is a real predicament, because you cannot implement new ways of working and leadership with the old type of command and control management, it simply does not work, staff will unintentially sabbotage such attempts. It is a bit of a catch-22: you need to apply the new ways in order to shift to the new ways, yet how can you apply these new ways, if you have not got anywhere you can learn and practice them?
One of the features that many 'future of work' models have in common is self-management. The problem is you cannot move to a self-organising system using an old management style, it is contradictory, people resist this, indeed managers stifle the shift. You cannot reinvent your business using traditional "change management" methods either, because you cannot impose change onto people and then still expect them to be engaged. Instead you have to invite them to co-create the change together; but this an alien concept to many managers. Moreover, you cannot "manage" self-management, the change process itself has to be self-managed and emergent. So how do you go about it?
This is precisely where I come in, it is the key area I can assist with. I can step in to help precisely where most managers are in a conundrum. I can help with the culture shift transition precisely by engaging the full participation of all employees in a self-organised way, reflecting the new. I can do this through a system of stewardship and by creating the conditions in which a gradual culture shift is more likely to occur.
Culture represents what everyone in an organisation values, does, thinks, behaves, avoids, works and relates with; it is built through shared learning and mutual experience. Like air you cannot grab it and change it. An organisation's history means it is differcult to "modify" because old common experience interferes, and people revert to old ways. You cannot work on just one aspect of culture, because it has little effect on the whole. Likewise "working on" some people, eg coaching the managers, by itself is unlikely to have a lasting effect, because the whole is more powerful than any single intervention. Most of this whole is hidden, like 90% of the ice underwater in an iceberg.
One thing that can be done, however, is change the shared learning. It must be shared, so the participation of everyone is pivotal, but if the culture shift is approached more like an ongoing shared voyage of exploration, with lots of iterations, prototyping and experimentation, all of which are shared, then there is a hightened potential for a shift in the mindset of the organisation to occur over time.
I can help the organisation embark on such a journey, stewarding the full engagement of all staff. This means inviting all employees or members to co-create the new story collaboratively by trial and error. If we have fun in the process, it is more likely to stick. I set the organisation on this shared learning journey, create the right environment for experimentation and learning to thrive and mentor the new emergent leaders with skills to make it stick.
I can achieve that in one of two ways: either in the internal capacity of an Interim Director, or externally as a Facilitator-Consultant. The former tends to work better because I can then be part of the team; on the other hand the latter enables an organisation to try it out for a set period and then see if they want to go all the way.
I also work in collaboration with other experts and specialists as needed, such as lawyers, coaches, method experts, agile masters, accountants, lean/kaizen masters,, creativity experts, HR transformation leaders, and culture change facilitators. Together we can work holistically and deliver an integrated experience, with the multiple components aligned to each other.
Does this sound like something you might want to consider? If so, please contact me and we can have a preliminary discussion and talk things over.
If interested please text, call or use this form to arrange a preliminary free of charge consultation, at: 07729371915, or +44 (0)20 8133 5211 or This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
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I look forward too hearing from you.
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François Knuchel BA, FRSA
Mob: 07729 371915 Dir: 020 8133 5211 |
