Challenge

More than 10 years of year-on-year organic and acquisition growth for our client had resulted in increased organisational complexity compromising operational effectiveness. Our initial engagement was focused on supporting the organisation’s Executive Team to elevate how it thought about the organisation and their role in leading its short and longer-term performance.

It quickly became apparent that enterprise-wide transformational change was needed, including refreshing the organisation’s enduring purpose, strategic direction and strategic priorities, cultural foundational, leadership approach and bench strength, strategic and operational ways of working, innovation capability, and more.   The challenge: Convincing an organisation and its people to change when everyone is too busy to change. 

Approach

Using agile-informed principles and approaches, The Holos Group first engaged the organisation’s Executive Group and more senior leaders in a series of conversations to support them in understanding the end-to-end of their organisation, and the importance of thinking “enterprise first” even over “functional efficiency”.  Simultaneously, we identified key change makers within this cohort who demonstrated systems thinking capacities and invited them to form an experimentation group to coordinate and trial alternative ways of working for the organisation, which included establishing a proposed new operating model for the organisation with supporting ways of working.

Next (and ongoing), we continued to uplift the ways of thinking and working for all business functions essential to the delivery of the organisation’s core value streams making focused and iterative changes to existing business practices to highlight and work with the organisation’s “immunity to change”.

Finally, we designed and supported the implementation of a high-potential Enterprise Leadership Program that focused on preparing emerging leaders of the organisation (independent of role and role level) to continue to embrace and continue to iterate the organisation’s renewed purpose, strategy, leadership approach, culture, and ways of working.   

Outcomes

• Expanding the ways of thinking capacity of the organisation’s Executive Team towards greater systemic and strategic thinking and leading.
• Developing and embedding of a new enterprise-wide strategy for the organisation that is understood by employees at all levels. 
• Complementing functional 
• Complementing functionally-focused BAU work with the implementation of cross-functional value streams to inform how the overall organisation coordinates and delivers continuous value to its customers.