who we are in clients’ eyes and our eyes

We’re a team of half-a-dozen senior consultants, serving clients and the needs of their executive and management teams, in medium to large organisations across Australia.

Our team members have extensive business experience (typically from a professional ‘big four’ background or from senior roles in large businesses), a huge number of  large-scaled assignments under our belt and substantial life experience.

The firm specialises in five service groups:

• Business direction, design, strategy & priorities (and more importantly, migrating from priorities to action)
• Organisational change making
• Project start up & recovery – at both operational and governance levels
• Complex, “wicked” or intractable issues management
• Organisational agility, rhythm, maturity and accelerated learning

Clients and  professional colleagues describe us in the following ways:

• We’re “process design consultants”, more than industry specialists – we co-design the steps to help you find & implement solutions that fit your business context and your capability
• We’re practical; we help implement, rather than simply provide models, studies or direction
• It’s common for us to recover a large change program or projects in trouble and then to help with the implementation and change making
• We stay the course until benefits are realised and delivered by your managers, leaders and teams
• We help leaders learn by planning for, contracting and then doing the agreed business improvements – learning through action, rather than instilling knowledge in class-rooms
• Our pedigree arises from business strategy work and from large-scale business change assignments, where we tackle change issues at both the governance level and the operational level – people call us pragmatic
• We work with an eye to mobilising staff as ‘enthusiasts’ for the business, to find and draw out the ‘volunteers’ in the organisation, so as to get new things done or to find, pilot, prove and use new ideas
• We don’t assume that organisations really work on rational lines or make decisions on just the data available to them
• We’re very comfortable around culture, people issues, patterns and sense-making, ‘tinkering’ in teams to find ideas and possibilities, rather than just working with tidy, predictable or known solutions, brought from other places
• We start at the executive level, to constructively challenge executive-level roles, habits, mindsets and behaviour
• We like working beside leaders and staff, leading and stepping back, coaching, leading and stepping back again…
• We formally contract to share our know-how and to help your leaders and project staff learn ‘on the fly’
• We’re used to partnering large ‘branded’ specialists and work well with Agile.

Our consulting principles are straightforward. We:

• Work with active & informed sponsors, who invest ‘skin in the game’
• Move comfortably between strategic and operational levels
• Work confidently on both ‘soft’ and ‘hard’ issues in organisations
• Engage in ways likely to attract buy-in, to sustain client ownership of the issues & to foster an effective working relationship
• Stand back if your people are capable and confident
• Never compete with leaders or managers for their role, status or authority