A Bar Too High

The organization’s vision was to be recognized globally as a center of excellence in their field, in seven years. Ambitious, for an organization that had just undergone multiple executive and management transitions and strategic positionings over a number of years, and a new leader with no previous experience heading an organization of this size.

The leadership team recognized that to achieve their vision and strengthen the industry, they needed to nurture innovation, create value and protect the stakeholders. Factors that inhibited progress were many: the systemic divide between those who’d been around from the start, the tenured old guard (traditional, set in their ways), and the new contractual employees (young, tech-savvy), which created a sense of exclusion and undermined productivity and engagement. Low expertise in their core field and inadequate project management skills. A seeming disconnect between the leader and some of the staff. A barely-existent connection with their clients.

They partnered with us to support their strategic and operations planning activities with the main objective to develop the key players into a high-performing, strategically aligned, customer-oriented, self-directed and accountable team committed to the organizational vision.

We designed an intervention program based on the organization’s needs, identified through pre-work and assessment activities. We gained crucial insights from employees at multiple levels. Our program combined a strategic combination of approaches.

We planned activities which enabled participants to express themselves in new ways, moved them to collaborate and contribute. By doing so, they began to feel a sense of ownership for what they would be creating and shaping. We got them to step out of their comfort zone and be more open to the new and untried, invited them to express their creativity, play, work as a team. The various games and interactive processes we introduced offered opportunities to interact and communicate with one another as they hadn’t before.

We analyzed social networks and interactions within the organization, enabling leaders to recognize, visually, the systemic contexts within which they were operating. Digital graphic representations showed the pathways of communication in their system, as well as the communication bottlenecks, and where there was isolation. We introduced them to other, non-linear ways of making sense of situations and scenarios using experiential processes. This allowed them to actually see how the dynamics of the various parts of their system played out.

For many, the activities were new and surprising. They gained an awareness of what part they played in the system. Others felt heard and seen. Through these interactions we were encouraging them to create more collaborative ways of working. We saw how some of the group activities helped to dislodge some existing barriers and tribal tendencies. We got them to envision their own future five years hence, and to visualize what that looked like and how they planned to get there.

We knew that for the learnings to take hold, for the shifts to be sustained, to prevent backsliding to the old ways, they needed champions from within their ranks who would ensure that the practices we had introduced would be sustained, learnings put to practical use. We weren’t sure who would step up to play these roles. For us, this felt like unfinished work, even after we’d given and done more than the budget allowed.