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Strategic Planning and implementation
So, you need a winning strategy. But even a winning strategy is worthless without the capacity to implement. With the complexities inherent in your organisation, from the conflicting opinions of individuals to the various and sometimes opposing streams of information and knowledge, the challenges are vast. By using processes that have benefited hundreds of organisations, we can help you conceive, develop and reach consensus on your strategy and support you in producing the expected benefits. It’s about creating coherence and alignment in order to implement your strategy at speed.
Click to read more >>Whole Systems Working
Gone are the days when all the relevant people in your organisation sat in one room, at the same time. Gone are the days when managers made linear decisions, free from the impact of our interconnected world. In our high-speed, global, networked economy, your organisation needs speedy adaptation to keep up. The solution lies in Complex Problem Solving using the Whole System, which puts your entire workforce and stakeholders in the same room at the same time, albeit virtually.
Click to read more >>Organisational Culture Change
It’s no secret that culture is paramount to organisational success. But developing and sustaining one that supports employee participation in decision making, adaptable work methods, sensible work designs and reasonable and clear goals isn’t an easy task. Add the pressure of a fast-paced and ever-changing economy, and it’s easy to see why some organisations fail to develop and implement an adaptive solution.
Click to read more >>Change Management
Introducing a complex change carries substantial risks of failure for the organisation, not to mention the reputational damage to its senior managers and programme directors. To put the risk into perspective, only one in five change initiatives are a success. The good news is that recent advances in the field are providing new methodologies, and these new approaches accelerate the implementation of change.
Click to read more >>Post-Merger and Acquisition Integration
Mergers and acquisitions hold great promise for increasing shareholder value, productivity and growth. On the surface, there are substantial financial gains to be made. But statistically, two out of three mergers and acquisitions fail to realise the promised benefits, and we know why. The best solution lies in timely and structured preparation and planning, from due diligence to post-merger vision and strategy and post-merger and acquisition integration.
Click to read more >>Business-led Project and Programme Management
Like a strong undercurrent beneath a seemingly calm sea, the linear, elegant world of the Gantt chart is underpinned by complex and shifting variables. And with variables come the potential to disrupt The Plan. Without an integrated, coherent, excellently managed project environment, you can look forward to projects that are delayed, failed or stalling.
Click to read more >>Team Development and Group Facilitation
Effective communication isn’t easy to achieve, especially when you put a whole team in a room. Team development and facilitation helps teams migrate as quickly as possible from talking about the work to doing the work and getting business results. Whether it’s an intact team or dysfunctional team, we get them to agree on actions, decisions and solutions, fast.
Click to read more >>Managing dispersed & diverse environments
Nowadays, face-to-face contact with colleagues is a rarity. Even if you sit in the same office, you’re more likely to send them an email than approach their desk. And if they’re scattered around the country, or even the world, then you’re highly unlikely to even meet them. Add the fact that they don't necessarily share all of your cultural values or assumptions, and the challenges are considerable. This is called a dispersed environment, and it has a substantial impact on the overall functioning of your organisation.
Click to read more >>Executive Coaching
If you want your people to be at the top of their game, coaching will hone their skills and reignite their drive. Whether it’s those on the front line who feel uninspired, pressurised or simply want to raise their game; or others who need to be brought up to speed, given direction or simply time to reflect, we have the models and frameworks to help you deal with intellectual, interpersonal or personal issues. Our consultants have installed whole organisation coaching systems, trained coaches, trained trainers and provided help with policy development, audio-visual materials, even standards, audit and evaluation of coaching.
Click to read more >>Mindfulness
Mindfulness is a very simple meditation practice that focuses our attention onto the present moment, to ourselves, others and the world around us.
Click to read more >>Coaching
You’ve heard the phrase ‘think before you speak’. Well, in the business world, it’s ‘think before you do’. That’s because with fewer and busier managers, employees are expected to think for themselves and act accordingly. The decisions may be small, but their cumulative effect weighs heavily on the success of the organisation at large. Thus, managers, team leaders and team members need structured opportunities in coaching sessions to maintain focused, productive and intelligent performance.
Click to read more >>Facilitation
Effective management of the array of ideas, opinions, knowledge, skills, perspectives and intelligences within your organisation is vital to its success. Only through reconciling the pool of talent at your fingertips will your eyes open to the breadth of business solutions available to you. But in our fast-moving and ever-changing times, we must find rapid approaches to reach a consensus. This requires layers of facilitations skills, and we offer a comprehensive service that will bring new meaning to the ‘harmony’.
Click to read more >>Internal Consultancy
Nowadays, it’s not unheard of to outsource basic HR processes, which means the transactional, administrative core of the HR function within organisations is threatened. Thus, competent HR professionals are looking to enhance their capability and build partnering relationships with business heads. The challenge then for the HR professional is to become Internal Consultants to the business heads. We can help your HR team become strategic business partners so they can provide a more valuable service.
Click to read more >>Strategic Account Management
Planning account strategy takes senior people away from direct client contact and face-to-face sales. What you need is cost effective, time effective account management that is sustainable. From experience, we know that structured approaches to Strategic Account Management yield productive long-term relationships, future business and sales. All good things and all vital to business success. We will help you build an infrastructure that’ll evolve as your business evolves, continually producing positive effects efficiently and rapidly.
Click to read more >>Influencing, Negotiating & Partnership
The secret to a successful organisation is the relationships within it. A solid foundation of goodwill that can be maintained in the long-term will help problems to be dealt with diplomatically and effectively. With a soup of different personalities and objectives to consider, you have to learn how to manage these relationships in order to win contracts and deliver on them. The same goes for your competition – the successful organisation needs to cooperate and accommodate in order to create opportunities rather than conflicts. We’ll teach you the techniques to build high-trust relationships that are solid and sustainable.
Click to read more >>Selling Business Solutions
Once upon a time, selling business solutions was down to the ‘knack’ of the individual. You either had it, or you didn’t. We now know that there are specific tactics and behaviors that increase the chances of closing a high value sale, and these can be taught. But, it’s not just about training people and hoping the skills are sustainable, it’s about unlearning old habits and embedding the new behaviours into daily work life.
Click to read more >>Transformational Leadership
When you’re at the top, you’re likely to work through several teams, departments and disciplines. Thus, face-to-face contact is few and far between. But if the opportunity to micro-manage no longer exists, how do you build loyalty, trust, admiration and respect? Transformational leadership empowers others to take more initiative in their work and inspires commitment, self-confidence and the ability to lead teams within an environment of rapid change. We’ll provide the learning opportunities, frameworks and techniques that will enable each leader to find their own answer to the key elements of transformational leadership.
Click to read more >>Balanced Scorecard
Hands up who puts day-to-day operations before strategy. Considering 90% of organisations fail to implement their top team's strategy, the hands should be plentiful. The Balanced Scorecard is a performance management system focused on strategic measures to encapsulate strategy concisely, balance financial and non-financial goals, respond to fast-changing market conditions and communicate this effectively throughout the organisation.
Click to read more >>Change Management
In the business world, change is good. In fact, considering the fast-paced world we live in, change is inevitable. But complex changes carry substantial risks. The upside is that these risks are avoidable. Collectively, we have hundreds of years' experience of designing and delivering change initiatives, captured in our change management programmes. We will help you plan and prepare specific initiatives, using the principal elements of this proven approach.
Click to read more >>Mindfulness
Mindfulness is a very simple meditation practice that focuses our attention onto the present moment, to ourselves, others and the world around us.
Click to read more >>A strategy fails when the leader computes and then expects their workforce to implement. Lack of ownership really is the nail in the coffin, and considering analysts who value companies set greatest store not by the quality of the strategy but by the organisation's ability to implement it, even the most brilliant strategy is worthless if you can’t apply it effectively.
There are two significant implementation challenges to overcome:
Your organisation faces the full brunt of the high-speed, global, networked economy, with all its potential for disruptive change. If you want to be successful, there really are no hiding places. Whether you’re going after those emergent opportunities or anticipating changes to your landscape, you need speedier adaptation. And for the changes that can’t be anticipated, your response must be like lightning or they threaten your survival.
But how can you solve complex problems in such complicated circumstances and with such little time? And once you've solved the problems, how can you implement actions, decisions and solutions fast enough for them to remain relevant in such a turbulent, competitive landscape?
The management imperative is weaker than ever
In our interconnected and crosscutting world, linear direction and lengthy decision making by managers is impossible. The solution lies in harnessing the whole organisation by designing cutting-edge interventions that draw on the new science of complexity.
Complex Problem Solving using the Whole System puts the whole (or a substantial microcosm) of your workforce and stakeholders in a same place, same time event in order to:
Culture is heavily implicated in organisational success. Organisations that support employee participation in decision making, adaptable work methods, sensible work designs and reasonable and clear goals perform at a significantly higher level than those that don’t.
These correlations are straightforward, but the cultures that provide certain firms with a competitive edge may be hard to emulate. And to make things worse, the classic literature on culture change refers to it as an extremely difficult, long-term process lasting 6-15 years. Such timescales are unrealistic in our rapidly changing business landscapes.
But here's where it gets interesting: performance results over time are supported by cultures that emphasise anticipating and adapting to environmental change, which is doable within rapid timescales.
As we’ve said before, rapid change and adaptation comes from getting the whole culture in a same place, same time event to provide them with:
Statistically, if you’re in the middle of a change initiative, there’s an 80% chance that it’s going to stall, is already stalling or has stalled. In implementing complex change, you may find:
So you've spotted the opportunity, done your Due Diligence and you’re either already, or you are about to become, financially and legally joined at the hip…
M&As hold great promise for increasing shareholder value, productivity and growth. However, statistically over 70% of all M&As fail to realise the promised benefits. There are at least three reasons for this:
On any given day, ambitious organisations are busy fielding a whole range of projects. But the complex, shifting sea of variables inherent in modern day organisations has the potential to disrupt even the most well conceived plan:
Someone once calculated that when two people communicate, they exchange 5-10 thousand bits of information per second. So, you can imagine the ‘bits’ hurtling around when you put a whole team in a room. Luckily, these ‘bits’ can show as three patterns, which can benefit from team development and facilitation:
Pattern 1
The team are a new team who need to be up on their feet immediately so that they can take off before they get eaten (c'mon, it’s better than 'hit the ground running').
Pattern 2
The team is happy and relates well; the members are functioning and productive. Their focus is on The Goal and they are looking for external, dispassionate process expertise to enable them to find the fastest, most efficient way of achieving their intended outcomes.
Pattern 3
The team are dysfunctional, troubled or traumatised and spend precious organisational time spinning their wheels on conflict, absenteeism, correcting poor quality work or failing to get much done at all.
What we can provide for new teams:
They say if you sit more than 30 feet from a colleague, you're likely to ring them or send an email rather than approach their desk.
Working in a dispersed environment, is now commonplace.You work with people on different shifts, possibly in partner, customer or supplier organisations, and with people of very different cultures. Maybe you work with people across continents or in different time zones.
It’s clear your opportunities for face-to-face contact are limited, and so effective working requires considerable planning and effort. Add the fact that it’s likely the people you work with don't share all of your cultural values, and the challenges can be substantial.
Let’s rehearse a few of the problems:
There’s no doubt that coaching hones and develops top class performers. Just look at the world’s greatest athletes – whilst maximum performance requires ability, coaching takes that ability to the next level. We have a deep knowledge of coaching and have made original contributions to the field.
Situations in which you might benefit from coaching include:
Only a few years ago the term was used exclusively to describe Buddhist meditative traditions. Now the corporate leadership world is taking a closer look. Recently neuroscience studies from Harvard University have shown that mindfulness training significantly increases brain grey matter concentrations in areas associated with Attention Control, Emotional Regulation and Self Awareness. Further evidence links mindfulness training to increased pre-frontal cortex activity, which is related to happiness and well-being. It has gained worldwide application as a distinctive method to handle emotions.
Currently, in the medical world, mindfulness programmes are used to help with physical problems such as stress, anxiety, hypertension, depression, heart disease and chronic pain. There are further connections, however, to how being mindful in our approach can help us to become more effective business leaders.
People who have trained in mindfulness have been shown to make more rational decisions. During times requiring pressurised decision-making, meditators activate a different network of brain areas compared with non-meditators and that enables them to uncouple negative emotional reactions from their behaviour.
Meditation has also been found to be a highly effective means of training managers in corporate social responsibility. The training significantly raises managers’ levels of care and concern.
Mindfulness programmes have also been shown to raise one’s level of emotional intelligence and improve relationships. Those completing a course of mindfulness show significant improvements with respect to emotional intelligence, perceived stress and mental health compared to others.
Whether you’re looking to develop yourself, or your company, OPDC provides a tailored programme to help unlock your potential leading to improved performance, growth and, ultimately, success.
What to do next...
All our programmes can be customised to fit your particular professional and personal objectives. For more information please contact us.
Nowadays, what organisations need are doers who can think and thinkers who can do. This is because organisations have de-layered, resulting in fewer, busier managers with a larger span of control managing employees who must be able to think for themselves. So no handholding there then. In order to keep the organisation running smoothly, we all need to be multi-skilled at multi-tasking, which is easier said than done.
Let’s break it down
A business is essentially a group of people who, through cumulative, small effects create a large effect: the successful enterprise. If managers, team leaders and team members are given structured opportunities in coaching sessions to think through their business issues, they are much more likely to do more focused, productive and intelligent work, which means better cumulative effects and better business results.
In creating those structured coaching opportunities, organisations must respond to two challenges:
Team leaders and managers succeed or fail on the basis of their ability to orchestrate the collective efforts of the diverse people they manage.
If you can reconcile the teeming multiplicity of ideas, opinions, knowledge, skills, perspectives and intelligences in your team and organisation, brilliant business solutions are there for the taking.
But we live in disruptive, fast-moving times full of discontinuous change, so to adapt, the cycle time for reconciling all this difference must be short. However, without the crucial facilitations skills for reaching consensus and without smart ways of analysing and addressing the challenges you face, your solutions either become irrelevant because they took so long to reach, or worse – they’re never found, with subsequent reputational damage to teams, managers and organisations.
We must find rapid approaches to reaching consensus that enable people to bring real attack to implementation. We have thought long and hard about how to help organisations cost effectively acquire depth and breadth in facilitation excellence. Here are our solutions packages…
The Facilitation Starter Pack
Your facilitators will develop the design skills to create efficient, highly productive meetings of 2-25 people that result in timely actions, decisions and solutions. They will develop their facilitation skills in specialist areas such as:
HR Professionals: from organisational servant to strategic partner
With the maturing of the HR outsourcing market, it’s now entirely feasible to outsource basic HR processes. So, the transactional, administrative core of the HR function in organisations is eroding and competent HR professionals are looking to become internal consultants to the business heads.
But the business heads face a number of pressing business imperatives, all of which have consequences for the skill sets of internal consultants:
By definition, ineffective Account Management Strategies fail to achieve sales, waste resources and carry significant opportunity costs: just a bunch of adults frittering away an expensive afternoon or worse, many afternoons.
But there is actually good evidence that structured approaches to Strategic Account Management yield productive long-term relationships and future business. More importantly, these approaches are teachable, and if carefully applied, they will increase your sales.
We can help you implement a system of account management that improves business results and is sustainable. These approaches enable your senior sales and marketing people to work together in agreeing on direction and the detailed actions in support of the direction.
What we offer
Account management is another organisational system that’s important, but hardly ever urgent. We’ll help you build a sustainable infrastructure that secures a system so effective that it becomes resilient against attempts to sideline it when the heat is on. We will help you:
Whether they're romantic, platonic or professional, relationships are complicated. Even those that are positive can eventually breakdown. That’s because when humans get involved, they bring an array of emotions, opinions and agendas, which don’t always play well together.
Woody Allen once described love as a virus with early symptoms of intense attraction and boundless goodwill towards the other. But in its chronic stage, the symptoms morph into irritation and an uncanny ability to row about everything…
In short, what was once a valuable relationship diminishes into something destructive.
Applying this to professional partnerships, the challenge is to build a solid foundation of goodwill from the start and then maintain it. With this robust and positive core – fuelled by mutual respect and understanding – any problems that arise can be dealt with diplomatically and effectively before they become detrimental.
The partnership dance…
Try to tango without learning the moves and you’ll step on your partner’s toes. Try to do business without building a good rapport, and you’ll do the same.
With a sea of different personalities and objectives to consider, you have to learn the partnership dance in order to win contracts and deliver on them. This ability to ‘dance’ painlessly through productive partnerships will propel your business forward positively and sustainably.
The death of competition…
The same goes for our competitors. Rather than butt heads, we need to cooperate and accommodate in order to create opportunities rather than conflicts. Thus, a new breed of partnering relationships for growth with our competitors is created: co-opetition.
We can help you turn competition into co-operation so that clashes of interests are converted into a mutually beneficial partnership. It’s all about shelving the ‘dog-eat-dog’ mentality and diplomatically managing the intricacies of our relationships, the negotiation process and ourselves.
It’s a fine balance, but successfully done it leaves the partnership, the businesses and the people intact and productive. Badly done, it feeds the lawyers.
We’ll help you to learn the techniques…
With our help, you will learn how to build high-trust relationships that will endure the test of time:
Luckily for the successful organisation, we now know what tactics and behaviours increase the chances of closing a high value sale, and what behaviours diminish them.
But there are certain questions that need to be raised…
Can others learn to use these behaviours correctly?
The answer is: yes they can – most of us already have them in our repertoire. The real challenge is to turn turgid science into compelling reasons why these behaviours are desirable, and then help people use them fluently in the emerging, complex sales conversation.
Do they improve sales outcomes?
Again, research shows that yes, they do improve sales outcomes, providing the systems are in place to ensure they are used, which leads us to the third question…
Is it possible to mainstream these behaviours until they are embedded in the culture?
Well, that depends. If you simply throw training at people and then hope it somehow embeds itself, almost certainly not. For many, the behaviours involve unlearning old habits and for some they can even be counterintuitive. If people are not supported in using these behaviours the day after a training programme ends, their chances of ever using them are slim indeed.
What we offer
This programme is carefully tailored to ensure best fit with your organisation:
In the de-layered, flattened organisational structures that are now commonplace, the bandwidth to micro-manage at any level is nonexistent. But if the opportunity to micro-manage is lost and face-to-face contact rare, how can we leave lasting motivational effects of loyalty, trust, admiration and respect that inspire people to serve and achieve more than they were considered capable of?
Transformational Leadership provides the answer to those leading their teams, departments and organisations through change.
What is Transformational Leadership?
What’s all the fuss about?
Since the 1993 publication of Kaplan and Norton's seminal journal article on Balanced Scorecards (BSC) in the Harvard Business Review, numerous case studies have made impressive claims for breakthrough performance in organisations that have implemented the methodology. Their later work on Strategy Mapping (SM) takes this further. Their approach poses two questions:
What is the need that BSC/SM is fulfilling?
Strategy is great in theory, but when competing with more urgent day-to-day operations, some stark facts emerge:
The successful introduction of a well-conceived change that brings business results is the pinnacle of management practice and job satisfaction. We love it.
But introducing a complex change into your organisation carries substantial, avoidable risks of failure (known to humorists everywhere as ‘mangling change’). These risks are not just to the organisation, but also to the reputations of the managers responsible for delivering the results.
However, whatever the risks of change, thriving organisations are dynamic systems, continually shaped by new demands that drive such changes as:
Only a few years ago the term was used exclusively to describe Buddhist meditative traditions. Now the corporate leadership world is taking a closer look. Recently neuroscience studies from Harvard University have shown that mindfulness training significantly increases brain grey matter concentrations in areas associated with Attention Control, Emotional Regulation and Self Awareness. Further evidence links mindfulness training to increased pre-frontal cortex activity, which is related to happiness and well-being. It has gained worldwide application as a distinctive method to handle emotions.
Currently, in the medical world, mindfulness programmes are used to help with physical problems such as stress, anxiety, hypertension, depression, heart disease and chronic pain. There are further connections, however, to how being mindful in our approach can help us to become more effective business leaders.
People who have trained in mindfulness have been shown to make more rational decisions. During times requiring pressurised decision-making, meditators activate a different network of brain areas compared with non-meditators and that enables them to uncouple negative emotional reactions from their behaviour.
Meditation has also been found to be a highly effective means of training managers in corporate social responsibility. The training significantly raises managers’ levels of care and concern.
Mindfulness programmes have also been shown to raise one’s level of emotional intelligence and improve relationships. Those completing a course of mindfulness show significant improvements with respect to emotional intelligence, perceived stress and mental health compared to others.
Whether you’re looking to develop yourself, or your company, OPDC provides a tailored programme to help unlock your potential leading to improved performance, growth and, ultimately, success.
What to do next...
All our programmes can be customised to fit your particular professional and personal objectives. For more information please contact us.
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