International workshop series – building your change adept organisation

You would have thought that the bigger organisations would respond to the current economic downturn by looking for better ways to cut costs and improve performance…

As a small consultancy specialising in helping clients do just that,  we have been finding it increasingly difficult to get in front of senior managers in the larger organisations with whom we can add greatest value. They are either putting off implementing  projects, finding in-house solutions or using the bigger, more established consultancies – “safe pair of hands”.

We have decided that our response to this should be get together with a group of consultancies across the world similar to us in size and thinking and put on a series of breakfast/dinner workshops aimed at our target markets. So far we have opened discussions with a couple of consultancies, jointly developed the focus and outline programme structure and have started testing it.

The focus of the workshops will be:
– What makes a change-adept organisation, with the resilience to cope with the ever-increasing complexity and uncertainty of today’s world?
– Benchmark your own organisation against key change capability characteristics
– Learn how to build the capability for change into your infrastructure, standard practices and core values – how to become a ‘change-adept’ organisation.

The intention is to charge enough to cover our costs so that it becomes a self-funded marketing programme.

Each workshop will be hosted, marketed and facilitated by the local consultancy, with one or more of the global team present to give it the international flavour we seek to get across.

The first workshop is planned in Amsterdam and focuses on the Healthcare sector, as our local partner reports good feedback on the idea from that sector. Discussions are in progress with colleagues and contacts in Australia, Canada, Denmark, South Africa and the US.

We see our role primarily as:

• initiating and managing the collaboration
• building the global image of the virtual organisation
• working with partners in each country to develop and agree the scope etc of each workshop
• participating in workshops to provide the ‘global consultancy’ flavour that we believe might help you to attract client interest
• taking responsibility for producing the series summary output.

Each local partner (including us in the UK) will develop its own marketing contacts using this programme as a vehicle, follow up, secure and ‘own’ any local business that comes from the collaboration, including other partners in the projects as appropriate. The purpose of the exercise is to help all of us develop our own consultancy businesses, not to create some kind of franchise monster!

If you have a good local network of senior people in large companies (preferably multinationals) that you would like to tap into with this proposition to expand your business and join us in this project, I’d be pleased to discuss it further with you.

Get in touch!