Consultancy

As a successful and experienced practitioner and leader of many years (digital product, research and design), including founding and running two digital product and service design agencies (fourmangos in Boston and phunQube in London), clients began to ask if I could utilize my blend of design and operational skills at an organizational level, to:

​

• Provide fractional or interim leadership

• Design new teams and capabilities

• Support digital transformation activities

• Help grow and mature existing teams and capabilities

• Assess and improve delivery models

• Identify hotspots (and recommendations for improvement) in workflow

• Shape and deliver new products or services (B2B, B2C)

• Help teams improve and mature their impact in their organizations

 

…and many other organizationally design-oriented activities.

 

Because of this, over the last 10 years, I have developed a framework to help identify what level of dysfunction exists, hotspots, and the associated activities required to help organizations and teams understand the inherent complexity of any required change.

​

As you can imagine, this kind of work isn’t easy. While you can fix the mechanics of workflows and processes, winning hearts and minds of the people involved is tricky, complex and requires a tremendous amount of patience, listening, understanding, and engaging in order to give all the other hard work you and your clients do a chance of success.

​

Working together, collaborating, co-creating can go a long way to getting people onboard and engaged in the process. You need to figure out just how much to do on your own, and at what point to engage people. There is absolutely no formula for this. I take each organization I work with on its own merits and adjust up or down each of the ways in which I work with them.

​

Typically, I engage across any, some combination, or all stages of the framework. This includes:

​

1. Assessment: Use 1:1s, reviews, workshops to identify hotspots, problems, maturity, conduct analysis to make sense of it, and create recommendations of work to be done.

2. Shaping: Design organizational and team structures, define leadership, create design principles, and identify a plan for work to be done (and by whom).

3. Recruiting: Where leadership recruitment is needed, shape the recruitment process, write roles and responsibilities, and support internal teams with the recruitment process.

4. Onboarding: Work with internal teams, HR and other departments to map out onboarding processes that create the right experience for new joiners.

5. Building: Work together on designing workflows and processes, governance, stakeholder and communications strategies, reporting and key team metrics.

6. Embedding: A period of time to help teams embed, fix issues in process or workflow (there will always be some), address gaps and help ensure teams are set-up for success.

7. Supporting: Provide a level of ongoing support to leadership to help tackle any problems related to change activities and growing a team's reputation and influence.

 

Most of these stages require client commitment and engagement (workshops, co-design, 1:1s) with the directly affected team (or teams), and with adjacent teams who will need to engage with this change going forward. This provides a direct line of communication about the work, engagement and a sense of ownership in the outcome, and improves success of the changes being designed and delivered.

​

If you’re interested in discussing any or all of these activities, please get in touch.