“Everything is really uncertain, and that is precicely what I find comforting”   Tove Jansson

Change is a process; the outcome is emergent.

Because change and emergent behaviour arise through complex, dynamic processes, we don’t arrive with a ready-made plan — we arrive with a deep understanding of what’s involved. We assist leaders and decision-makers in broadening their understanding of their situation, and help them identify and resolve the significant impediments they face. The same uncertainty that creates those impediments also gives rise to opportunity. People resist change for a multitude of reasons — some technical, but most adaptive: resistant to purely technical diagnosis, and easy to miss if you’re only looking for a technical problem to solve.

Our team is skilled in working with people and teams across an organisation to uncover what is actually happening, and to probe for the unrecognised, untapped potential for culture change, growth, and emergence. We facilitate processes that lead to greater awareness of what is, more self-organisation, genuine participative collaboration, and innovation. Along the way, we find the next right steps where the system’s dispositions are pointing us. That, in practice, is what organisational change looks like from the inside. For further reading on how we facilitate group processes and larger-scale change, including shifting organisational culture through micro-shifts and sensemaking, see our piece on transformative processes at scale.

We understand how complex adaptive systems behave. We help organisations manage the intelligence potential of the present, rather than chasing an idealised future state that causes them to miss signals and opportunities along the way. We tap into the distributed intelligence of the workplace — people know, most of the time, what is going on, what is going wrong, and how things could be improved.

We provide the means to tap into that knowledge and gain real-time, relevant, ongoing, ground-level data about what is actually happening at work. By scanning that data for weak signals, trends, emergent behaviour, or friction points, we can help nudge the system in a generative direction — finding locally contextualised solutions and conditions for sustainable change and beneficial emergence. We enjoy working with Dave Snowden’s Cynefin Framework and the SenseMaker® tools by The Cynefin Company, where Hannes and Anne are on faculty to deliver Basecamp and other courses.