‘We’ situations requiring coordinated action
From 3 to 300,000 participants
Within one, between two, or across many
For-profit, not-for-profit, government, NGOs, associations, academia,…
In-person, 100% virtual, or hybrid collaboration
Initial ideating, goal-setting, roll-out, problem-solving,…
The case studies in the tabs below cover a diverse range of situations from the hundreds conducted. In each, the group enjoyed a combination of speed, efficiency, and results unavailable from conventional collaboration methods.
Alignment at 30,000′ usually becomes misalignment at 30′
The Situation
A national retailer’s e-commerce grew from an initial online presence and small, dedicated staff into a large portion of their annual revenue. As online grew, people, processes, and technology kept changing. Store personnel have an increasingly educated customer with more choices. The supply chain is accommodating new demand sources and fulfillment paths. IT, Human Resources, Legal, and other functions change their operations continually.
The Requirement
The retailer hired a management consulting firm to design the omnichannel strategy to present ‘one face to the customer’ and synchronize all operations around the current and future customer journeys. The future state picture called for new and modified systems, policies, procedures, organization design, ways of working, and culture.
The Solution
In the first month of the project, the Change Management consultant conducted an Executive Alignment assessment. Through the SchellingPoint process, the CEO and four sponsoring CxOs expressed 34 different outcomes they would consider indicators of project success. They all agreed with 19, but disagreed about the other 15. After the consultant helped them resolve this misalignment, they attempted to map the 34 back to the 9 goals stated in the business case behind their $350MM investment. The group reconciled 20 of the 34 to the 9; the other 14 became additional objectives.
The Result
Translating the 9 high-level business case goals into 34 specific, measurable objectives – and validating executive alignment around them – ensured the sponsors took one detailed definition of success to their project teams, the regional leaders, the store personnel, and corporate staff.
Click here to visit the 20 examples.
Annual goal setting surfaces discontent with a recently revised business strategy.
The Situation
A private equity firm had acquired a US retailer. The private equity firm’s internal consulting group was brought in to help the retailer revise its five-year business strategy and operating model.
The Requirement
One year into their corporate re-positioning, the retailer’s leadership determined they needed to take stock of their situation and select a few core objectives for the next 12 to 18 months. The new CEO brought in by the private equity firm chose a consulting firm using the SchellingPoint software to lead the discussions among a leadership team comprising new leaders such as himself and several from the pre-acquisition management team.
The Solution
The group’s virtual dialogue analytics identified strong alignment amongst the eight most senior executives around the more tactical, operational activities that were underway but weak alignment around their core strategy and go-forward operating model.
The visual display of alignment across the strategic to tactical subjects lead the COO to declare ‘Houston, we have a problem here.’ There was distinct misalignment around the implementation of one aspect of their revised strategy, plus one of the revised operating policies – which several leaders were pleased to have out on the table in full view.
The Result
Through two half-day solutioning meetings, a re-evaluation of their competitive positioning and brand differentiation was conducted, focusing on their branded and non-branded product strategy.
With revised go-to-market priorities set, the organization enjoyed three years of revenue and EBITDA growth.
Choosing whether to stabilize or maintain pace during a period of high growth.
The Situation
A mid-size services firm had experienced three years of double-digit growth. Its go-to-market strategy needed refreshing, with clear goals and objectives for the upcoming year.
The Requirement
The firm’s leaders realized they had important choices to make. They understood the need to refresh the go-to-market strategy, but with ‘all hands on deck’ managing the growth, meetings were being postponed.
Also, leadership was conscious that unresolved tension was growing between informal calls to ‘slow the growth to consolidate our execution capability’ versus ‘continue the high growth and risk a few errors.’ A similar divergence was present around the firm’s customer targets, typified by statements such as ‘grow share-of-wallet in the major accounts,’ versus, ‘expand into new markets.’
The Solution
The firm’s President chose to use a consultant using the SchellingPoint software to engage her organization in the go-to-market strategy revision and formulate a set of goals and plans that would meet the firm’s continued growth goals but gain support from its personnel.
42 staff engaged in the virtual dialogue and solutioning activities – leaders, managers, and key staff from business development and service delivery in addition to the leadership team.
All activities took place after the workday ended when personnel felt they could focus on their internal needs.
The Result
The different policies described above were included within the group’s virtual dialogue. However, before these policies could be discussed and agreed, two surprising issues surfaced in the analytics.
On the one hand, confidence in the business model, the leadership team, and the market opportunity were high, but there was unforeseen concern around brand differentiation and decision-making policies.
In two, 3-hour leadership team meetings, the go-to-market strategy revision and supporting annual objectives were identified and endorsed.
The firm maintained its growth rate over the following three years.
Stakeholders with competing interests develop a policy for financial sustainability.
The Situation
A Health Information Exchange for a US state had been established using available federal and state grants. Given notification of the termination of these grants, the HIE’s governing body faced the question of how it would fund its future operations and growth.
The Requirement
The Health Information Exchange had two years in which to identify and build new sources of income before the grant funding ceased. Unable to agree upon an approach that would provide financial sustainability, the HIE’s executive director hired a strategy consultant using the SchellingPoint software to lead the board and management through a strategy development process.
The Solution
Competing interests of the insurance company payers, health care providers, and board members from organizations representing patients and the public complicated the need to find new revenue streams.
However, the group’s transparent virtual dialogue enabled anonymous comments, and the governing body was able to transcend their personalities and focus on how to make the HIE sustainable.
A breakthrough occurred when the process diagnosed that stakeholders were using different definitions of the word “payer” in their discussions and held different financial assumptions regarding technology development grants.
The Result
With these previously unstated assumptions surfaced, the differing meaning for words being used regularly in the conversation (a common issue in groups) was rapidly resolved.
Within ten weeks, the team developed a strategy and business plan that enabled financial sustainability. This organization is now among the few Health Information Exchanges in the country with service revenues that exceed its operational costs.
A Fortune 50 CEO wants to clarify his leadership team’s view of their vision.
The Situation
After two decades of growth, the organization was embarking on a nine-figure ERP implementation to enable the upgrade of its core business processes to maintain operational efficiency. A brand-name management consultancy had proposed the strategy to make the change, and another had given responsibility for the program.
The organization’s strategy was not in debate; the average tenure on the leadership team was over seven years, and the core business strategy had not needed to change in five years.
However, challenging economic conditions had surfaced on the horizon after the program started.
The Requirement
The CEO wanted to ensure that his leadership team would drive the three-year program from the same vision for their organization, something he felt necessary for success but essential, given the incoming business conditions.
The Solution
Rather than conduct a conventional three to six-month management consulting project to clarify their vision, mission, and strategy, the CEO elected to hire a management consultant using SchellingPoint’s advanced consulting software and skills with two Business Strategy templates. His primary reason was speed, efficiency, and cost – he needed the project done in weeks and not hold up the transformation.
The virtual dialogue analytics surprised the leadership team, who had worked together for over ten years. For example, their different beliefs about the role and ranking of Operational Excellence, Customer Intimacy, and Product Innovation surprised the team (using Wiersma’s Three Disciplines of Market Leadership template in SchellingPoint.)
Their assumed like-mindedness had led to actions and initiatives that were becoming fragmented and silently had taken the implementation of shared values in different directions. Realizing they needed to agree on a common viewpoint, three 2-hour meetings were used to maximize alignment around their direction.
The Result
The subsequent strategy, and how it implemented their definition of their vision, was rolled out to their top 100 leaders within eight weeks. The initiative is given credit for enabling the organization to experience eleven growth quarters over the next three years, through the market challenges.
Who are we, and what do we do?
The Situation
The CEO of a cosmetics company was discussing with his management team and first-level leaders how to increase revenue 20% over the next three years. The growth was to come organically, not through acquisition. The growth strategy consultant hired to help them find the answer had helped the leadership surface an exhaustive range of approaches and options.
The conversation had bifurcated around two different approaches to their go-to-market strategy. Ideas such as new pricing schemes, new advertising campaigns, voice-of-the-customer analyses, retooling the sales force, new partnerships, and an exhaustive list of rational actions were debated but with little resolution.
The Requirement
With the CEO’s approval, the growth strategy consultant chose to insert a consultant using the SchellingPoint software into his project to shift the client team onto common ground.
The Solution
Twenty-nine executives and senior managers participated in their two-hour virtual dialogue. Their alignment analytics immediately surfaced a highly divergent assumption, one that had not been explicitly discussed by the group.
Over half of these senior managers believed the company sold ‘commodity cosmetics,’ while the others viewed their product line as a set of ‘value-added facial solutions.’
The difference explained why the suggestions for organic growth were so divergent; price, position, and supply chain improvements conflicted with solution selling training for salespeople and value-based marketing strategies.
The CEO and his team spent three hours clarifying the nature of their product lines. The group agreed that they were selling low-differentiated cosmetics into a highly commoditized, competitive market.
The Result
The clarification allowed the group to select the appropriate marketing and sales strategy adjustments, which have been core to their continued revenue growth.
Establishing coordinated action to deliver a new business strategy.
The Situation
As part of a corporate reorganization, the back-office operations within five business units were reorganized into a single shared services function. The new organization, comprising two-thirds of the original headcount, crafted new vision and mission statements plus a set of strategic objectives. However, after nine months, the group’s performance was not meeting expectations, including zero improvements in its operating expenses.
The Requirement
The organization hired a management consultancy using SchellingPoint to work with the new management team to find ways to attain the original business case objectives.
The Solution
The leadership team’s virtual dialogue showed that a set of fundamental beliefs and assumptions regarding the environment they were operating within were misaligned. For example, a key assumption related to their success rate within a key part of R&D, and how they compared to benchmarked peers.
One of the fifteen senior leaders felt their performance was poor; the other fourteen claimed it was top-box, upper-quartile performance. When asked for their reasoning, the general response was that “We are XYZ, we are the market leader, we are as good as any competition,” whereas the dissenter shared anonymously, “Here is the three-month-old report showing that we are not half as good as our benchmark peers.” When the group accepted this markedly different competitive position, it changed an underlying foundation of their strategy.
A major roadblock surfaced was some team members making a negative inference about the motivations of other members, relative to the financial goals. This had led to inaction directly preventing the targeted cost reductions. Within ten minutes, the inference was found to be rational but wholly inaccurate.
A third finding was the cost-reduction objectives were not complemented by any value-creation objectives. Therefore, the group lacked any shared objectives; they had no positive targets they could only achieve through cooperation.
The Result
The group retained the vision and mission statements but are working to a revised, interdependent scorecard, with supporting actions agreed to by all.
Ensuring go-live success from Day 1 to 100.
The Situation
Within a Fortune 50 organization, an internal team of corporate, global, and national change managers was appointed to lead their local section of an ERP upgrade impacting the company’s entire customer-facing quote-to-cash processes. The project was moving the organization from a legacy system to SAP, with integration to multiple third-party applications.
The Requirement
The team was required to assemble a coordinated change strategy. The head of change chose a management consultant using SchellingPoint and the advanced consulting process to facilitate her group.
The Solution
Working virtually across the globe, the 16 change leaders assembled a 100-day and two-year change program comprising 47 actions across seven workstreams to attain 18 change objectives.
These objectives described success from the first site go-live to the third, with consideration for scale-out requirements across the company’s 60 locations.
The group covered all aspects of the implementation, from business unit priorities and IT capabilities and constraints, to the role and use of internal subject matter experts and external consultants, plus mechanisms for handling scope clarification and change, through to training efficacy assurance.
Through the Change Strategy template and virtual dialogue showing what needed to be discussed, and in the order in which to discuss it, the team assembled their agreements, goals, and plans within ten hours, through six virtual meetings.
Beyond the pure technical changes impacting the business users, multiple policies, for example, regarding ‘pushing information’ vs. ‘having users pull information,’ had to be reconciled. The modes, types, timing, and levels of personalization of communications, training aids, and job aids were specified, and projected shortages in internal subject matter and process experts mitigated.
The Result
The change strategy roadmap provided consistency across the organization’s global upgrade.
Bringing clarity, completeness, and prioritization to leadership’s goals.
The Situation
A US-based automotive company funded an enterprise-level Omnichannel strategy to bring their disparate customer and distribution channel systems and processes together. The ‘one-company’ strategy comprised consolidation of IT systems, behavior, and process changes from the corporate office to each consumer-facing employee.
The Requirement
A specialist organizational change management (OCM) consultancy was contracted to lead the project’s change management, independent of the global consulting firm leading the overall program.
The Solution
Parallel with setting up the change network and other common change program start-up activities, a SchellingPoint software-driven virtual dialogue was conducted among the C-level executives to bring full clarity to their expectations, requirements, priorities, and concerns for the initiative.
The seven CxO’s expressed over 140 opinions related to the nine goals they had set when funding the Omnichannel strategy. This virtual dialogue analytics surfaced two common problems in such programs, that leadership’s goals were listed but not prioritized, and several were open to interpretation due to a lack of tangible performance metrics.
The unexpected issues caused the process to be extended to the next level of leadership, over sixty vice-presidents and managers. This coverage surfaced a high degree of alignment around the overall sentiment and purpose of the Omnichannel strategy but divergent expectations around specific policy, process, and capability changes.
The Result
The key misalignments within the C-level executives visualized by the Advanced Consulting Software were reconciled by the OCM team leader using Advanced Consulting Skills in four in-person meetings.
Their new agreements were communicated to the next level of leaders, who participated in six weekly virtual meetings to resolve the misalignments, misunderstandings, and omissions in the programs’ details.
This collaboration created a set of executive and field-level managers who led the transformation from a common set of goals and expectations.
Making a transformation project work on the second attempt.
The Situation
A utility company had tried to upgrade its consumer-facing IT platforms and associated billing, service, and maintenance operating processes three years earlier. The program met strong resistance from operational managers and staff. Small, standalone technology swaps had occurred but the core of the change, a new ERP system, never moved from proof of concept into production.
The Requirement
The utility decided to take another approach and gain commitment to the changes at the outset of a new, second attempt at the program. They selected a change consulting firm using SchellingPoint’s software.
The Solution
Unlike the first program, an invitation went out to several hundred personnel from field service engineers to back-office accountants to participate in a virtual dialogue about the program.
The alignment analytics immediately identified that the need for the change was mostly acknowledged and the consumer and utility benefits. However, over 50 constraints were expressed, anonymously, with 17 having broad concern among the participants.
The utility’s leaders and program management team identified inaccurate misunderstandings causing resistance and mitigated the issues and concerns of which they had previously been unaware.
The Result
The utility has moved to the new ERP platform.
Changing to a customized leadership competency (behavioral skills) model.
The Situation
The client is a regional healthcare system comprising five hospitals – four acute care and one rehabilitation hospital – as well as a drug and alcohol treatment facility, a research facility, and a home health service. US health care reform and market dynamics had increased pressure for the health system to further enhance its performance.
The Requirement
Their internal business planning process surfaced the need to create more holistic attitudes about policies, protocols, and practices across the hospitals to support ongoing improvement efforts in quality, safety, and financial results.
The Solution
A consulting firm specializing in culture development was selected for their experience and Culture Engine™, their assessment and solutioning template running in the SchellingPoint software. The President and CEO championed, and the Senior Vice President of Human Resources spearheaded the change. A key output was a customized leadership competency (behavioral skills) model.
The Result
Over three years of implementation, the competency model is now incorporated into all human resources management practices.
The CEO has reported ‘the kind of results we had hoped for.’ “One example of cultural change driven by the Culture Engine™ process is ‘System-Wide Thinking.’ With a focus on this competency, localized thinking and behavior is receding and is being replaced with initiatives to standardize clinical protocols across all facilities to achieve clinically integrated networks. Job rotations among the facilities are now becoming the norm, and the sharing of best practices has become an organizational standard.”
He adds another important outcome, “The competency ‘Developing Others’ has driven the creation of the first-ever employee development process and has kick-started the creation of a succession planning process that manages the organization’s talent from a system perspective, using a common definition of leadership.”
Their experience with the Culture Engine™ was differentiated by the early identification of barriers and unintended consequences. “The methodology allowed us to quickly identify key challenges so that the team could begin to work through them in our first meeting. Without the process, it would have taken months to figure out the best approach to move our organization to the next level of excellence”.
Culture change helps reinvigorate a European brand.
The Situation
A new CEO was brought in to return an established, respected European brand to growth. One year into his tenure, the management team determined it was time to target changes to the organization’s culture and remove issues at the heart of ongoing challenges.
The Requirement
A Human Resources consultancy was hired to determine where and how the culture should change to support the new business strategy. The consultancy was chosen because of their people expertise and their SchellingPoint capabilities.
The Solution
1,300 personnel across Europe participated in their two-hour virtual dialogue. Over 170 opinions described people’s views, hopes, aspirations, and concerns for the company’s culture.
Among all the information and useful insights generated, the concept of silos and their role in the culture stood out. On the one hand, silo-thinking was described and recognized as an impediment to collaboration, innovation, speed, and efficiency. On the other, staff saw silos as a way of providing community, connection, knowledge depth, and pride.
An approach to removing the word with its negative connotation and negative consequences was innovated that enhanced its positive attributes. These changes became part of a two-year culture change roadmap across six workstreams comprising 67 individual actions.
The Result
Within three months of starting the change roadmap, positive results were experienced and reported by staff and senior leadership.
Defining, measuring, and improving supply chain quality cultures.
The Situation
Effective supply chains are essential to any organization and its customers, no less so in the pharmaceutical industry, where shortages and recalls can impact patient health. The 2012 FDA Safety and Innovation Act gave the FDA new authorities to address the challenges posed by an increasingly global drug supply chain.
The Requirement
In response to the FDA’s declared interest in an organization’s ‘commitment to a culture of quality’, Xavier Health, in collaboration with PwC, launched an initiative to engage with industry to (1) define ‘a culture of quality’ and (2) to measure and compare groups within one company as well as compare results across companies, to improve company and industry supply chain performance.
Xavier Health and PwC asked SchellingPoint to help them find how to define and then measure ‘a culture of quality.’
The Solution
Over 80 pharmaceutical quality leaders participated in two rounds of online virtual dialogues via the SchellingPoint software. Using Systems Dynamics influence mapping, cause-effect matrices, goal clarification techniques and the SchellingPoint sentiment indices, Xavier, PwC, and SchellingPoint identified 28 behaviors that constituted the cultural root drivers of quality.
Pilot data from 22 participating organizations showed an overall sentiment that the culture of quality in their organizations was below ideal, across the board. Interestingly, but possibly not surprisingly, quality leadership was generally of the opinion that a culture of quality existed while production operators were ambivalent, at best.
The Result
Pharmaceutical organizations are now using the Quality Culture Improvement Program (QCIP) to measure the presence of the 28 leading indicators of a quality culture in their supply chains. The results feed directly into an action roadmapping processs to improve those which are insufficient.
A recent QCIP project saw 1600 personnel participate of 2000 invited, produced over 5,000 pieces of quality information regarding the 28 leading indicators, resulting in five being action roadmapped for improvement.
Solidifying the identity of the customer within a B2B product company.
The Situation
When you make a product that is specified, bought by, and then used by different organizations on the way to the consumer – who exactly is the customer? How does R&D factor in the variety of needs, interests, and preferences beyond gathering and listing them? How do they create a view that is shared by marketing, sales, manufacturing, and finance?
The Requirement
The R&D leadership team of this Fortune 250 organization needed to be clear about the answer to these questions as they saw the market and their competition changing. They needed to clarify and gain alignment around their meaning of the term Customer-Centric. They hired a management consultancy using SchellingPoint’s software.
The Solution
The group identified 16 dimensions of customer-centricity. For example, Inclusion was the theme associated with all opinions related to the role customers do, could, should play in the company’s R&D processes. Customer Perspective was the theme associated with all opinions related to what customers received from and wanted from the R&D processes.
A related theme was Economics, housing all the opinions related to the financial value and costs of the ideas and current actions associated with custom-centric behaviors.
The group’s virtual dialogue across these 16 themes of customer-centricity identified 14 underlying assumptions which need to be verified before a valid set of policies could be debated and selected. Through three global teleconferences, data and reasoning were shared and discussed on these items and all other aspects of customer-centricity in a series of five to ten- minute micro-conversations.
The Result
A policy comprising 11 objectives and associated behaviors was documented, describing the successful implementation of R&D customer-centricity to guide the customer lifecycle from ideation through development and delivery to improvement.
Winning back a key customer after losing them through acquisition.
The Situation
An IT services firm had serviced the client for over two decades. The firm’s account manager regularly attended the client CIO’s planning meetings and her colleagues interacting with the CIO’s teams in person daily. They enjoyed ‘a seat at IT’s table.’
One day, the CIO informed the account manager that a private equity firm had acquired them. Within three months, the CIO was replaced, along with over half of the client’s IT leaders. The new CIO informed the account manager that all suppliers were under review and their relationship needed to become more traditional customer-supplier and that due to the size of their spend, their relationship would be one of the first to be evaluated.
The Requirement
This situation was new and unfamiliar to the IT services firm, the account manager, and her support team. After years of deep relationship, they found themselves ‘outside the door’ and cut off from their customers inside the client. The account manager needed to form a response and plan how her team would manage the relationship in the coming months rather than be reactive to the client’s next move.
The Solution
An IT consultancy using SchellingPoint was asked to help the team revise their account strategy. Sixteen colleagues participated. The client CIO and his team were invited to collaborate in the process, but they declined.
Using the group’s virtual dialogue with the Client Account Strategy template, an agenda was selected for a one-day strategy meeting. On that day, the group decided their client’s behavior could not be predicted, as they and their new owner found a path to business success. Foreseeing multiple twists and turns, in terms of client requirements, they developed a ‘shadow’ strategy, to stay as close to the account as possible and be ready to react.
The Result
The account manager shared her firm’s ‘shadow’ strategy with the client’s new CIO. However, soon after, they were informed they will be replaced by a less expensive competitor.
The incumbent deployed the shadow strategy in the coming months as they continued to serve the client while unwinding their services and transitioning them to the new supplier. Within the year, the client CIO changed his mind, disappointed with the new supplier, and re-engaged with the incumbent for another five years.
Replacing proxy, indirect measures of alignment to accurately pinpoint opportunities.
The Situation
Supplier-side relationship managers in B2B organizations want to ‘be aligned’ with their customers but have only had indirect methods to assess that alignment. Voice of the Customer, Satisfaction Surveys, and Contract Performance Scorecards are valuable but incomplete measures of a B2B customer/supplier relationship. They measure satisfaction and performance – which is completely different from alignment.
The Requirement
Supplier relationship and account managers need an objective, data-driven way to identify how aligned their organization is with each customer’s needs. Customer’s purchasing and category managers leading the supplier relationship need to be able to objectively measure the degree of alignment within and between the 10’s to 100’s of colleagues involved in B2B customer-supplier relationships.
The Solution
Organizations are using SchellingPoint to surface known and unknown relationship challenges and opportunities to create explicitly quantify alignment and surface the conversations that their traditional meetings fail to reveal.
In one case, a mid-size manufacturing company used SchellingPoint to provide the data for their semi-annual business review, with a large, growing customer relationship involving over 50 personnel from both companies. Each participant invested 20 minutes into their virtual dialogue.
Once their alignment profile was acknowledged, two key statements in their misalignment lead to an important conversation. The supplier’s account manager felt “I would have never imagined being able to have the conversation if it wasn’t there on the screen”, and lead in the same meeting to a conversation between a customer executive and her sourcing manager that “adjusted the sourcing manager’s understanding of what was deemed success for the supplier.”
The Result
The supplier is now enjoying an increased Share of Wallet at the customer. The same process at other customer/supplier relationships has surfaced $500,000 savings opportunities, increased innovation levels, service levels, and overall customer and supplier partnering.
Turning apprehension into new revenue.
The Situation
A professional services organization was interested in the concept of digitalizing its service offerings. However, the practical implications were unclear, and key personnel voiced resistance to the idea.
The Requirement
The CEO continually heard from his network of examples of consulting digitalization and the benefits. A management consultant using SchellingPoint was asked to facilitate a discussion within the leadership team of their interest in and ability to execute digitalization of their service offerings.
The Solution
The seven participants expressed 115 opinions on the topic in a two-hour virtual dialogue, conducted virtually from their desks. The AI-enabled analytics pinpointed what needed to be discussed, and the sequence, in a one-day in-person workshop. There was no pre-ordained decision or a pre-defined outcome. The conversations were to objectively assess if, where, how, why the firm’s service offerings could be digitalized in a way that would add significant value to themselves and their clients.
Positive drivers included views such as the benefits to their brand and the reduction of menial project tasks for their consultants. Issues cited included concerns that consultants would have to learn to use software technology beyond Word, Excel, and PowerPoint and that going digital would mean less time interacting with clients. Some viewed the use of survey tools as being sufficiently digital, while others wanted to find ways to use AI and machine learning.
The Result
The value of the positives was clarified and the constraints were mitigated using the 3-Step S.O.S process. The consulting leaders came to an agreement they should pilot one digitalized service offering as a testbed for their learning. Within the first year of standing up the digitalized service, they sold four projects of medium size to existing and new clients. They have a strong pipeline and are training additional consultants to deliver the service.
Initial concerns such as a reduction in time with clients did transpire, but the quality of client meetings rose, causing both client and consultant to appreciate the greater efficiency and efficacy.
Going digital – Learning how to coordinate multiple technologies, personnel, motivations, and skills across multiple organizations.
The Situation
Financial Services is being described as an industry moving from ‘Financial services firms using technology to Technology firms selling financial services.’ One smaller financial services organization became concerned it would not have the financial and personnel resources to keep up with the large player’s digital innovation.
After reaching out to another CEO about the idea, seventeen CEOs showed interest in co-funding a common digital platform. A plan and budget assembled, financial and human resources were committed, and co-development started.
The Requirement
Within the first year, the collaboration was not performing at an operational level as the founders had expected. Milestones were not met, and some participants were expressing frustration with the program.
One of the CEOs was familiar with SchellingPoint and hired a management consultant using SchellingPoint to help the collaboration get on track.
The Solution
The CEOs participated in a two-hour virtual dialogue around the subject of a successful digital platform collaboration. The topic ranged from the long, medium, and short-term forecasts for technology innovation in financial services to assumptions about customer’s needs and the competition’s action. Internally, fourteen areas were covered, from synchronization of the collaboration with each firm’s own business and IT strategies to staffing needs and skills sets.
The summary was that more had been accomplished than realized. The mutual benefits came in the form of shared knowledge, policy modifications, vendor selections, prototypes, and staff skills development.
There were two primary constraints. First, beyond co-funding a digital platform for common use, the strategy details were light, in terms of the outcomes the platform needed to enable, the choice of path to take. This second constraint was a ‘first’ for the CEO’s – bringing together staff from over a dozen different firms, where each had their own culture, decision-making methods, collaboration styles, and work habits – and getting them to work together efficiently and effectively around a single IT architecture which had to support their individual needs.
The Result
Two half-day and one full-day workshop were held where the CEOs discussed 23 planning uncertainties, 28 goals, and objectives, 15 barriers to success, and identified 76 actions – a combination of changes to existing actions and new actions.
A revised two-year roadmap was approved and funded by the members is in development.
Taking digital from a promising idea to effective implementation.
The Situation
A US-based services organization had assembled a digital strategy and rolled it out into its workforce of nine hundred employees. The digital strategy had three core themes that would bring digitalization to their customer relationships and interactions, service offerings and support models, knowledge management, and sales and marketing processes.
Teams of internal personnel were identified to lead the strategy’s implementation. However, one year into execution, there was immaterial progress.
The Requirement
A management consultant using SchellingPoint was asked to perform a comprehensive assessment of the situation and a plan to bring the strategy on track.
The Solution
Forty executives, managers, and key staff involved in the digital strategy implementation participated in a two-hour virtual dialogue, expressing 188 unique, relevant opinions across the five themes of the strategy and 21 cross-theme subjects.
SchellingPoint analytics showed where the problems lay. These became the agenda for a global team of 8 partners, managers, and key contributors from Europe, Asia, and the US, who met online at various times of the day to share the burden.
They dealt with issues such as feedback that the concept of digitalization was still too vague for most personnel. Too many objectives were ambiguous and needed clarifying with measures and targets. ‘Low-hanging fruit’ projects to quickly ‘go digital’ were still hanging on the branches and areas identified for digital transformation were not receiving the thinking time they needed.
The Result
The team defined eight categories of actions, from incentives and communications to digital skills hiring and training, to data strategies and data analytics tools, to marketing and branding changes.
A Chief Procurement Officer refreshes her 3-year strategy.
The Situation
This global manufacturing company was coming to the end of its current three-year procurement strategy and needed to upgrade it for the next three years.
The Requirement
With 95 category managers and sourcing team members on all five continents, the CPO wanted a way to accomplish the task without travel costs and inconvenience.
The Solution
A consulting firm using SchellingPoint was hired to lead the procurement strategy refresh. The process was expected to surface a routine set of ideas that would be discussed and translated into a set of objectives and plans.
Strong alignment existed around the function’s core role and purpose. However, the alignment analytics highlighted two strategic decisions needing to be taken. One was related to a concern that a round of technology upgrades and related processes changes were insufficiently implemented and stable, whereas others disagreed and were eager to get on with new initiatives.
The other was that many saw the function supporting the business strategy through transactional excellence, whereas others felt the function could drive into providing more value-add, strategic services to the corporation.
The Result
Nine regional leaders of the 95 engaged in the virtual dialogue participated in six virtual, webcam-enabled dialogues, their content selected using the group’s virtual dialogue analytics. They established a plan to cement the new IT and procurement process foundations being put in place, then stand up an innovation workstream to experiment with new service offerings.
Refreshing IT to support the company’s new five-year strategy.
The Situation
A food company refreshes its corporate strategy on a five-year cycle. The company’s functions then adjust their strategies in response, as required.
The Requirement
As a global food company, the role of social media, digital technologies, mobile devices were requiring increasing attention externally, and collaboration, globalization, and security, internally. The CIO wanted to open a full dialogue on how IT needed to be set up, organized, and operated to enable the new business strategy.
The Solution
The company had used the SchellingPoint software to form other strategies and chose to use it again for this topic. Over 50 IT leaders and managers and their ‘internal customers’ – including the CEO, all CxO’s, and other senior leaders, participated in the two-hour virtual dialogue over three weeks.
The dialogue covered IT’s value proposition to the business and its costs to portfolio and project management practices, its organization model, onshore and offshore outsourcing, skills and talent, and its technologies for operating IT.
The virtual dialogue quickly showed that the business wanted practical, timely, IT-enabled innovation from an operation grounded in developing and running transaction systems.
The Result
Through two workshops of 24 IT leaders and managers, with content determined from the group’s analytics, an action roadmap was assembled to review and revise almost all aspects of IT, ranging from skills inventories and gap analyses to global desktop infrastructure strategy. The food company has sustained its growth, enabled by IT’s new skills and services model.
One year after a supply chain strategy revision, few milestones have been met.
The Situation
The acquisition of a similarly sized, complementary product company triggered the need to merge two supply chains into one for the integrated operation. A supply chain consulting company was hired to help design the new supply chain. Nine months into implementation, there is little tangible progress.
The Requirement
The project management team had tried to get the project moving using conventional root cause analysis, deep-dive meetings, and stakeholder workshops, with negligible impact. They hired a human performance consultancy to use the SchellingPoint process to learn why progress was poor in this multi-location, distributed project and find out how to get it ‘unstuck.’
The Solution
Supply chain leadership believed that key parties feared the impact of the change and were not supporting it outside the project conference calls. However, the analytics of the group’s anonymous two-hour virtual dialogue (conducted as sixty minutes, thirty minutes, and thirty minutes online over three weeks) surprised project leadership.
They indicated that several operational leaders did not believe the underlying data used by the consultants to justify a number of the changes.
Compounding the situation, unresolved differences in their two company’s approaches towards the use of outsourcing, quality control standards, and process improvement methods were blocking implementation of the changes with which they did agree.
The Result
Facilitated by the consultant, project leadership ran a series of six one-hour virtual meetings to clarify definitions, expectations, and the reasoning for certain components of the strategy. Several business cases were reviewed, causing some actions to be postponed or removed from the plan when their ROI models could not be validated. The reduced plan is implemented.
Ensuring executive dialogue is authentic and safe.
The Situation
A mid-size B2C services organization had grown to over 3,000 employees in four locations across the US. The Chief Human Resources Officer determined the organization should clarify its approach to diversity and inclusion. The leadership team agreed and placed the objective on their corporate scorecard.
The Requirement
The strategy revision started with the CEO and executive leadership team. Due to the sensitivity of the subject and the need to ensure executives could share their most genuine opinions on the topic in safety, a consulting firm using SchellingPoint was selected to run the process.
The Solution
All nine members of the executive leadership team participated in their two-hour virtual dialogue, expressing over 160 unique and distinct opinions on the topic. Subjects ranged from the definition of diversity to diversity’s role in enabling the company’s mission and supporting its values, to whether diversity was optional or mandatory and whether any actions be implemented quietly or overtly.
The subjects and opinions covered all company personnel, customer segments, supply chain partners and suppliers, plus their competition.
Strong alignment within the leadership team existed around the need for greater cultural competency in all personnel and stronger accommodation of diversity in the firm’s services.
At the same time, the leadership team found that their alignment was weak around the approach to any changes. The primary debate was whether they should set a path to attain defined diversity and inclusion goals or set policies and allow outcomes to emerge through a series of small actions.
The Result
The leadership team converged on an endorsed strategy and roadmap commencing with cascading the policies and principles through education to the rest of the organization.
Minority leaders at a Fortune 50 design greater inclusion.
The Situation
The organization operated multiple minority communities within its worldwide workforce. The Black Executive Leaders group comprises managers at the Vice-President level and above. With over 50 members, the group is established and meeting regularly.
The Requirement
The group wanted to formally create a strategy to define and guide their actions in the coming years. They hired a diversity consultant and a strategy consultant using SchellingPoint to facilitate their discussions.
The Solution
The group expressed 159 different opinions across 11 dimensions of black diversity and inclusion in the workplace. The anonymous virtual dialogue prevents participants learning the source of an opinion, who agreed and disagreed with it, and from where the reasoning behind those sentiments came. The black executives displayed one of the strongest degrees of alignment of any of the hundreds of groups measured.
The small amount of misalignment within them was focused in a few areas. For example, some saw their employer as superficially committed to diversity while others experienced them as genuine and authentic. The discussion that reconciled these different interpretations of the organization’s true sentiment set a foundation as to how the group would approach the organization with their goals and plans.
Another root issue for the group was the business case for diversity and the degree to which it existed, and was understood by all communities.
The Result
Through a one-day workshop, the group assembled a strategy to grow membership in the diverse communities through education and link diversity to the organization’s go-to-market strategy.
This activity was an early part of a long chain of diversity events. The organization has been recognized in the US press for its leadership in diversity and inclusion.
The case is being written…thank you for your patience.
A Board of Directors develops and successfully implement a 3-year strategic plan.
The Situation
Twelve organizations have formed a coalition for sharing knowledge and developing solutions to emerging sustainability issues in their industry. Through the success of its initial projects, the coalition proposes setting up and jointly funding a non-profit dedicated to the work.
The Requirement
The coalition board, comprising executives from each member organization, agree they need an up-to-date strategic plan before hiring an executive director, embarking on a fundraising campaign within and outside their organizations, and launching additional programs.
A management consultant specializing in business plan development is engaged in leading the strategic planning process, using the SchellingPoint software.
The Solution
Each Board Member invests 90 minutes into their virtual dialogue to communicate their opinions before a 4-hour Board Retreat. At the Retreat, after acknowledging their aligned assumptions and goals, the board members focused on resolving key misalignments core to their future strategy.
The Result
The effort results in a 3-year roadmap with 38 activities, each with timelines and responsibilities assigned to the Board Members. The sustainability-centric activities will be conducted and led by individual members in some cases, by groups of members in other cases.
The Executive Director is hired to lead the attainment of the strategy and roadmap. After two years, the organization accomplishes 34 of the 38 sustainability projects and decides to use the same process to create its next two-year strategic plan. The updated plan creates 23 new projects that are now underway.
Upgrading ‘My department’s strategy’ to ‘Our company’s strategy.’
The Situation
A consumer products company (CPG) allowed its approach to Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and sustainability develop individually within functions, with synergies and conflicts managed at the local level by the local leaders. With increased attention among media and consumer activist groups on the subject, a CSR department is formed and staffed, reporting to the SVP, Operations. (Most formal reporting at the time relates to carbon emissions and factory-level reporting.)
The Requirement
The CSR group’s leader is responsible for assembling an enterprise-wide, coordinated, global, sustainability strategy. This strategy and policies will provide the marketing and sales functions with correct messaging, direct the supply chain on how to adjust, and ensure the organization is meeting all regulatory commitments. A management consulting firm using SchellingPoint is hired to facilitate the assembly of the sustainability strategy.
The Solution
Thirty-one leaders across the enterprise, from procurement and sourcing to public relations and sales, participate, people familiar with the sustainability factors in their domains. Additionally, to ensure the accuracy and completeness of their goals and policies, external subject matter expertise is brought in through four independent CSR and sustainability experts.
The group’s virtual dialogue analytics surprise them, highlighting the ‘silo’ thinking currently in place. With each function content with their local CSR approach, their collective alignment was low. i.e., They shared a few common views otherwise were in distinct yes/no groups on many elements of sustainability.
This divergence is both a lack of detailed understanding of factors outside their areas and exemplified approaches optimized for a function without the guidance of enterprise-level optimization.
Visually seeing their collective opinions and weak alignment brought the realization that no single department owns CSR and that each function’s actions impacted their colleagues up and down the supply chain.
The Result
As part of assembling their 10-year strategy and investment model, the group makes several ‘Right for the long term, but costly in the short term’ decisions.
With their 10-year CSR outcomes explicitly defined, the group takes ‘the long view’ with immediate actions relating to third-party product certification, new levels of supply chain engagement at the initial material source, and a revised engagement model with consumer advocacy groups.
Aligned around the concepts but not the tactics.
The Situation
A 38-person coalition of ultra-high net worth philanthropists, business leaders, academics, and sustainability innovators form an investment group to tackle climate change and sustainability issues. After eighteen months, they are mostly disappointed with their lack of progress making multi-million-dollar investments to fund sustainability projects and initiatives. Further, there is limited satisfaction with those investments that have taken place.
The Requirement
A management consultant using SchellingPoint is hired to develop the group’s next 2-year investment strategy.
The Solution
The 38 members of the coalition possess a very strong degree of alignment around their mission, objectives, and goals, as stated in their charter. However, the group’s virtual dialogue analytics surface two unknown misalignments that are the root of fundamental differences of opinion around their use of funds.
One was the philosophical approach to investments – a series of planned actions versus emergent steps. The second was driven by rational but two conflicting views of the direction of the earth’s environment. Just over half of the 38 members favor the view around climate change that the earth is not dead yet, but going through its natural climatic lifecycle, exasperated by human actions. The smaller group believes that the earth is now dead, or in a dying process that cannot be reversed, and the priority should be to decelerate the rate of decline of the atmosphere and environment. These divergent, mutually incompatible views had never been clearly expressed – examples of implicit beliefs that brought the members together to ‘use their resources to impact climate change and sustainability.’
The Result
With insufficient data on the impact of climate change and its trajectory available for people to shift from their core beliefs to a common view, the coalition realized they would be more effective splitting into two investment groups.
With a shared mission, each group now operates independently with its own investment strategies.
Shifting a global disease strategy from research to patient impact.
The Situation
Four leaders from philanthropy, academia, disease control, and industry shared a common concern for the lack of progress made against an infectious disease whose primary victim is children. International research and aid groups were reporting their individual activities each year as research papers and conference presentations, but there was immaterial progress in reducing the patient count.
The Requirement
Thirty-six global specialists from Australia, Brazil, England, Ghana, Switzerland, the United States, and other countries involved with the infectious disease, were invited to come together to formulate a coordinated global strategy to eliminate the disease. A management consultant using the SchellingPoint software was hired to lead the strategy development process. The challenge the group faced was that with the transmission mechanism unknown – how patients contracted the disease – donations on a large scale were not, and would not, be forthcoming, and any strategy would need to accommodate that fiscal constraint.
The Solution
Working virtually, with one in-person meeting with some attending online, the group converged on a single, two-step strategy. There were no deep divisions or misalignments within the community; they had just never been aware of their like-mindedness around what needed to occur and been given a venue to collaborate around acting.
The focus of the discussion centered on developing a common vocabulary and sequencing a logical action roadmap.
The Result
With a focus on Early Detection and Early Treatment, one group piloted methods that lead to severe case counts falling from 187 to 2 in the first test district. The initiative is now in its scale-up stage.
Ideas and techniques are field-tested, new detection and treatment training are implemented, and new fundraising is providing a channel of investment from the coalition to the villages and patients.
Creating Coordinated Action to Prevent an Environmental Disaster.
The Situation
In 1869, a small mid-western town constructed an irrigation system to support its residents, businesses, and outlying farms. Through the last 150 years, the town became a major city, with a local population of over 150,000 with the surrounding farms a key part of the US food supply chain.
As the town grew, the irrigation system grew. Then, twenty years ago, the first alarms were raised that the over-a-century-old infrastructure was reaching a point where patching and small maintenance would be insufficient.
After that first warning, more warnings came from city engineers that a catastrophic failure was becoming more likely. Unfortunately, the original charter documents from 1869 had not planned for the ownership rights and obligations, regulatory compliance demands and penalties, and insurance and liability conditions, of the 21st century.
This made federal, state, local city, maintenance firms, and other involved parties reluctant to lead the conversation for fear of the liabilities and costs they might incur.
The Requirement
Two years ago, city engineers decided the conversation could not be delayed any longer and hired a management consulting firm, specializing in the utility industries and using SchellingPoint, to convene the involved parties and find a sustainability plan for the irrigation system.
The Solution
Sixteen executives from various branches of government, citizen organizations, farm and industry groups, and maintenance organizations, participated. Their private, anonymous, virtual dialogue surprised most of the group with how likeminded they regarded the urgency to act, and the best engineering approaches to guarantee another 150 years of uninterrupted water supply in and around the city.
Within this context of agreement over what should occur, they determined the funding sources and the roles and responsibilities of the various parties.
The Result
There is a great relief that an endorsed solution is found. Funding is secured, and the long- term repair and overhaul work is underway.
Releasing the potential of pre-competitive collaboration.
The Situation
Multiple pharmaceutical companies and university research centers around the world were individually investigating a field of human biology they each saw as foundational to changing the pace, cost, and success rate of drug development.
The Requirement
The research leader at one of these organizations felt better progress would be made if organizations would engage in a coordinated, pre-competitive, research program. He acquired the services of an internal consultant within his organization who uses SchellingPoint and invited peers into a collaboration strategy. Twenty-five scientists, researchers, academics, and policymakers accepted the invitation to participate in creating the strategy.
The Solution
The globally distributed experts conducted their virtual dialogue before a 2-day workshop. They expressed 79 actions that should be taken, but with only mild alignment. They used this insight to converge on a subset of agreed actions by identifying those who supported a set of shared objectives.
The agenda also included operational factors and resolved issues such as the lack of common research standards, inadequate communications between inter-disciplinary silos, and intellectual property ownership.
The Result
The event is hailed by the participants as a unique success in cross-industry and multi-disciplinary collaboration. Five years later, it is credited with setting the research agenda for the topic.
Turning the thoughts of 542 experts into 1 innovation roadmap.
The Situation
Healthcare 2020 is a sub-strategy within the European Union’s overall five-year strategy for Europe (2016-202). An objective within Healthcare 2020 is the ‘…innovation and adoption of in-silico clinical trials’. i.e., Increasing the capability and use of computer-based simulation and modeling in the design of drugs and medical devices.
When applying for approval for a new drug or medical device, only performance and safety data from human clinical trials has been acceptable. Consequently, computer-based modeling is only done by research universities and pharmaceutical and medical device manufacturers interested in it for their purposes.
The European Union wants in silico clinical trials advancing due to the potential for faster, less expensive, and safer new product development.
The Requirement
A coalition of scientists working in this domain was funded to assemble a 10-year innovation roadmap for in silico clinical trials. A European consulting firm using SchellingPoint was selected to provide the organizing process.
The Solution
Over 540 of the world’s experts working in this field in healthcare IT, the life sciences, academic research, hospital innovation, and several related roles, participated in the project.
The consultant used SchellingPoint to gather insight and opinions through global virtual dialogues. The content and analysis of these dialogues were used to pinpoint the important conversations to conduct in four meetings across Europe over 18 months, using SchellingPoint’s framework for roadmap creation and completeness.
The Result
From data modeling and modeling algorithms to data security and patient privacy policy to new business collaboration models and modeling skills development, the Avicenna project assembled a 10-year roadmap to advance the capabilities and adoption of computer-based clinical trials.
In support of the project’s findings and recommendations, a 57-3 vote in Brussels adjusted the EU’s process to accept ‘alternative data’ (from computer models) in product approval submissions. Subsequently, the Avicenna Alliance was formed as a 501(c)3 to take roadmap implementation forward as a public/private partnership.
Using consulting process innovation to design consumer product process innovation.
The Situation
A US CPG company had increased its investment in product innovation, with the majority of new product R&D conducted in collaboration with a primary innovation partner. Due to the growth in the number of projects in the innovation pipeline, the communications, decision-making, and responsibilities of the 50 people involved at both companies became less clear.
The Requirement
To prevent a negative impact on innovation output and the relationship, the CPG company selected a consultant using the SchellingPoint process to help them assess and optimize the innovation collaboration process within and between the two companies.
The Solution
Fifty-one stakeholders from both organizations across the US and Canada were key to assembling a complete, credible, and viable process improvement plan. The 51 ranged from senior executives to technicians in the New Technologies group, supply chain, compliance, shipping, quality, product management, and other functions that dealt directly with the projects.
The group’s anonymous virtual dialogue provided an objective assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of the relationship. Using the analytics, six virtual meetings were conducted to solve issues and enhance processes from onboarding new staff and chartering new projects to intellectual property sharing policies and the definitions of innovation to new working methods and rewards systems.
The consultant ran the project 100% virtually from their offices, meeting the client and participants only via telephone and GoToMeeting.
The Result
The group assembled a change plan comprising 37 actions across nine workstreams.
Determining how to increase sales of the market-leading product.
The Situation
The client’s product was the recognized market leader by sales volume in a mature market with multiple competitors. However, marketing estimated that sales could grow further by 200%. This prediction was based upon two factors – removing the barriers to first use and removing the causes for churn and customers leaving the product.
The Requirement
A consulting firm using SchellingPoint was hired to lead the innovation process for the product.
The Solution
The consultant assembled a set of stakeholders comprising cross-functional client personnel and external product and industry experts from each point in the product’s supply chain.
Collaborating remotely across the US and Europe, without any physical meetings, the group generated 99 distinct ideas, covering 20 aspects of the customer journey. This idea set was processed and reduced to a proposed package of 20 changes, 7 of which would increase initial use and 13 mitigating the current reasons for stopping use.
The Result
The proposals became part of the company’s Intelligent Product project and have received dedicated resources for prototyping, market research, and scale-up.
Ensuring full support and commitment to a complex IT initiative.
The Situation
A government software and services firm want to upgrade a core enterprise application from client-server to the cloud. The current version is well established in the market, operating in multiple states across the country. Seven city CIO’s indicate interest in collaborating with the supplier on the technology transition.
The Requirement
The cities using the current client-server version have not previously collaborated in a joint-IT project. For this reason, and the importance of a successful program on future sales, the software vendor hires a management consulting using SchellingPoint to facilitate the development of the co-development contract.
This project will also be the first time cities have procured IT collaboratively, and they expect the whole process to take the full two-year procurement cycle from the development of the collaboration plans and their approval through to funding.
The Solution
The CIO and 2 CxO’s from each of the seven cities plus eight software company personnel share their views of the co-development project using a two-hour virtual dialogue.
This group of 35 express 193 unique opinions on the project’s objectives, priorities, barriers, principles, and 12 other themes relevant to such IT projects, from integration strategies, reporting requirements, and user interface design to customization, localization, and standardization of processes.
With their areas of alignment quickly acknowledged, key misalignments and concerns across the eight entities are assigned to four working groups. These groups converge on agreed plans and objectives, including two fundamental issues related to the scope and funding of customizations, and implementation planning.
The Result
Through the conversations, one state chooses not to participate and amicably steps out of the group. For the six partnering cities, the conventional two-year procurement cycle is completed within three months. The project is funded with a shared cross-city budget, and the technology transfer takes place.
Stopping silo-thinking from compromising a corporate initiative.
The Situation
A product company had revised its customer relationship management strategy in light of changing buying behavior and a desire to strengthen its 1-to-1 capabilities. A revised CRM system, touching multiple market stakeholders, was a key element in implementing their new go-to-market strategy. Three months into the three-year project, the corporate strategy executive became aware that the issues he had raised when the project was being designed had appeared.
The Requirement
The IT Director wanted an independent audit of the project to validate the concerns and surface any other issues occurring ‘below the waterline.’ A management consulting firm using SchellingPoint was hired to run this audit and produce an endorsed go-forward strategy.
The Solution
52 marketing, sales, R&D, and IT leaders, including the executive sponsors and the project implementation team engaged in a two-hour virtual dialogue. The community’s overall degree of alignment was inadequate, and surprisingly low, for such an early stage into a new project. Analysis of the key misalignments indicated, for example, that several departments did not agree with the project’s business case, based heavily upon projections of customer adoption rates.
Several believed the rate of customer adoption was excessively overestimated. This unresolved concern was causing them to privately questioned the project’s viability and priority.
Further, it transpired that the executive sponsors, while supporting the project, had different opinions as to its role in the long-term customer relationship strategy. Unaware of their different beliefs, their functional teams and the project implementation team were receiving different guidance on the scope and content expected in the new CRM technologies.
Compounding a questionable ROI model and non—aligned leaders, representatives from marketing, sales, field services, and customer support services had differing opinions as to the degree to which the project should be a technology swap or a deep functional change in thinking.
In the absence of a defined decision-making protocol, IT was being forced to make business decisions, for which they were then criticized.
The Result
The executive sponsors acknowledged how their incomplete alignment was causing cracks throughout the project team and supporting organizations below them. They used two 2-hour teleconferences to reconcile their differences and set a clear direction for the balance of the project.
Finding the path out of a perfect storm.
The Situation
A private equity investment and a new leadership team had put this national services company into the top tier of their industry. However, during a corporate risk assessment, IT is identified as a weak link in the corporate strategy.
A new CIO is hired, chartered to bring the IT function up to par. The new CIO and his 12 senior IT leaders refreshed the corporate IT strategy. Their strategy involved re-balancing the applications portfolio from mostly custom to packaged applications, moving to an agile development methodology, and upgrading the IT organization’s development and maintenance skill sets. Also, undocumented, single point of failure applications are to be retired, and the desktop and server infrastructure upgraded across over 100 locations.
Unfortunately, within six months, progress had almost come to a standstill.
The Requirement
The CIO is under intense pressure to deliver the essential changes and take IT out of ‘red status’ in the company’s growth plan.
The Solution
The IT leaders conduct a two-hour, anonymous, virtual dialogue around what is required to be a high-performing IT function that will deliver its strategy. Their alignment analytics were critically low for a group less than six months into a strategy they all had a hand in developing.
The analytics identified that three conflicting activities are causing the transformation to stall. 20% annual business growth is demanding IT-enablement and support for an accelerated number of field deployments of fault-intolerant systems. At the same time, IT is trying to source, learn, and re-platform legacy applications to packages. Compounding the change, IT staff with new skills are trying to transition to an Agile, SOA-based architecture. The IT leaders express differing views of the state, progress, and criticality of these three workstreams.
The business cannot wait for the project lead times required to accommodate IT’s learning; incident rates are increasing, and the interdependencies between IT activities are causing ‘root cause versus symptom’ disputes. Over 110 opinions describe a plethora of issues, for which there is full alignment around only 4 and strong misalignment around 31 of the noted problems.
The Result
The analytics were used to identify a sequenced agenda where the 12 IT leaders reconcile their disagreements and design mitigating solutions to the validated issues – their path out of the storm.
Enabling authentic dialogue around a critical but sensitive topic.
The Situation
Acquisitions of the weak by the strong have been occurring for many years, but in one industry, a ‘Merger of Equals’ has become a trend.
The Requirement
Board chairs and CEO’s are asking, “How do we have that conversation within our board and leadership team? What should we discuss, in what sequence, in a way that will be authentic and deal with the emotions involved?” An industry association decides to produce a guide to help CEO’s and boards have a full conversation and make a well-considered decision.
Thye commission a management consultancy using SchellingPoint to formulate the tool.
The Solution
CEOs and board members with experience of the merger and acquisition process plus industry experts participate in an anonymous two-hour virtual dialogue on the topic of evaluating and conducting a merger of equals.
Their inputs become a set of 87 test statements covering 16 aspects of the decision in a SchellingPoint-based process for helping a board and leadership team assess their interest in and ability to conduct a merger of equals.
Leadership teams comprising 6 to 22 executives have used the Merger of Equals template to safely express their views as to why the option should, and should not, be considered. “Do we have ‘equals’ out there?” “Are any of them suitable candidates?” “What outcomes should a successful merger produce if there are? “How might it cause damage?”
The process works at the personal level, too. “Would a merger leave an executive feeling they have failed?” “What positive or negative impacts would it have upon them and their career?”
The Result
The Merger of Equals template is allowing boards, CEO’s, and their teams to share their opinions safely and conveniently on the subject and learn their team’s alignment within one hour. The alignment insights are used to acknowledge their position on the subject and provide the discussion points to assemble an endorsed Evaluate/Reject decision.
Ensuring genuine commitment before signing on the dotted line.
The Situation
A firm’s acquisition team is completing due diligence at the acquisition target. If it goes ahead, it will be the largest acquisition the company has ever made, by a sizable margin. The acquisition target is a distressed brand that will take significant investment and management commitment to bring back into growth mode.
The Requirement
The management consultant advising the company on the acquisition recommends a consultant be brought in to use SchellingPoint to help them make the best go/no-go decision when the due diligence activities complete. He advises the executive sponsor they need to ensure that all colleagues involved in the due diligence process, and the acquisition integration if it goes ahead, genuinely endorse the decision, with everyone on the same page about what they would be taking on board, or rejecting.
The Solution
When due diligence completes, fourteen executives and acquisition team members from the acquirer anonymously share their views of the acquisition candidate and the integration requirements based on their due diligence findings.
The alignment analytics illustrate the due diligence team’s support for the acquisition overall with three key elements of the post-merger integration plans enjoying solid endorsement.
At the same time, there is strong misalignment around three of the assumptions built into the draft business plan; the need for certain retained staff, the timing of financial investments, and the consolidation of the target’s supply chain partners.
The majority of misalignments and success barriers are reconciled within the team. Two items are taken to the full executive leadership team for clarification.
The Result
The acquisition takes place with known alignment amongst those leading its integration. There are no surprises or course corrections in the first year. Four years later, the acquired brand is thriving and enjoying a strong comeback.
Ensuring coordinated action once the deal is signed and reality starts to bite.
The Situation
The statistics on successful mergers are poor, with the majority deemed as failures or having materially missed their business case. Despite this, acquirers regularly declare success to their staff and those involved in the merger – when few consider it successful and complete. Claiming a merger is done and successful because the integration tasks have been checked off is not the same as both acquiring and acquired leaders, managers, and personnel saying that the new combined entity has few operational problems and is on a strong upward trajectory.
Two to four months into a merger is the soft underbelly where the scope of the ultimate outcomes becomes set. The two organizations have spent time together, learned about each other, have new and revised opinions about each other, and what is going to be possible and what is not.
The Requirement
Two technology companies are signing the merger contract and want to ensure the merger does not go the way of most. They hire a management consultancy using SchellingPoint to maximize support for, and alignment around, the merger goals and plans.
The Solution
Three months into their post-merger integration activities, 152 executives, managers, team leads, and key contributors from both companies, in multiple locations, participate in a two-hour virtual dialogue around the integration. Subjects include the go-to-market strategy, product development plans, organization and talent plans, and financial models the integration plan is designed to implement.
Overall, agreement with the who, what, when, where, why, and how is strong. This leads to the validation of most of the planned or underway post-merger integration actions and slight adjustments to others. However, four types of issue are discovered that are causing or will cause problems. Although the acquirer blames the acquired leaders for two of the problems, they turn out to be due to errors in due diligence by the acquirer. The other two are misunderstandings of the acquirer’s CEO’s comments after the acquisition in recent town hall meetings with the acquired staff.
These four being dealt with, the post-merger integration continues with an adjusted action roadmap. Participants’ alignment is re-measured four more times over the next 18 months to ensure the merger team is aware of the unavoidable drift in thinking as the merger proceeds.
The Result
Four years later, the integration program manager states that the SchellingPoint component is one of the smallest line items in the merger costs but the most impactful on its success.
Ensuring the necessary conversations occur to prevent disaster
The Situation
A financial services firm operated an extensive portfolio of venture investments. Changes in the economy, changes within their limited partners, and an internal strategic decision taken years earlier came together to threaten their future earnings. None of this was a surprise to the management team. However, its impact and pace were more apparent to some than others. Proactive problem-solving discussions were derailed by those foreseeing negative personal consequences from the potential solutions they envisioned.
The Requirement
The team needed to go beyond talking about their agreement of the pending problem, its impact, and their desired outcomes. They needed a way to surface their concerns, doubts, and fears and discuss those where there wasn’t agreement about them.
The Solution
The CEO hired a management consultant to take the team through the SchellingPoint process. Using the anonymous opinion-centric analytics, the consultant stepped them through an Outside In sequence of 17 conversations that respected but reconciled their non-likemindedness and generated mitigating solutions to each concern.
The Result
Each objective, neutral, item-by-item discussion validated some change ideas, invalidated others, and surfaced new ones. The team collaboratively assembled a strategy for securing their future earnings goals that no one envisioned when they started the conversation.
Enabling a valuable industry coalition to avoid life-threatening changes – Coming Soon
The Situation
The Requirement
The Solution
The Result
Enabling a valuable not-for-profit to avoid life-threatening economic changes – Coming Soon
The Situation
The Requirement
The Solution
The Result
A first-time outsourcer minimizes risk and maximizes buy-in.
The Situation
A professional services company was experiencing high growth. It decided to consider Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO) to ensure it had the talent acquisition capacity to support its growth and flex that recruiting capacity through the projected growth peaks and troughs.
The Requirement
This was the company’s first outsourcing decision. They assumed there would be an RPO configuration that would be right for them but wanted to find it before committing. They wanted to minimize the risk and disruption of a flawed choice on their growing organization. The company spoke to several RPO firms to become educated about RPO, understand this type of outsourcing, and learn how to make their decision.
The Solution
One of the potential RPO providers offered to help the firm learn and clarify their requirements by using a consultant leveraging the SchellingPoint software and acting as a neutral third party. Accepting the invitation, the process took two weeks.
Nine company and four outsourcer personnel participated. Each anonymously shared their assumptions about RPO, the need to consider it, the outcomes it could and should produce, how it should operate, potential negative side-effects of building internal recruiting capacity, and the barriers to standing up a successful process. The group expressed over 190 opinions in total, including 32 reasons why RPO might not be successful.
The Result
Company leadership had valid expectations of RPO’s purpose, its scope of use, and the core operations it comprised. However, beyond the viability concerns, the alignment analytics identified divergence within the company leaders around the customer/outsourcer roles and responsibilities – some executives wanting RPO to reach deep into their organization, while others wanted any RPO services limiting to augmenting a growing internal recruiting capability.
This fundamental difference of opinion was reconciled, and the key concerns validated and mitigated. The dialogues used knowledge and insight from the RPO consultants, facilitated by the SchellingPoint-enabled consultant.
The company’s CEO said the process gave his team valid confidence they understood what they were buying and from who. A 5-year RPO contract was configured, signed, and conducted through the firm’s growth and eventual acquisition.
Even an aligned supplier cannot satisfy a misaligned customer.
The Situation
Dissatisfied with its incumbent supplier, a public sector organization chose to shift the outsourcing arrangement for a consumer-facing function, three hundred personnel, and the entire IT infrastructure, to a new outsourcer.
The Requirement
The new outsourcer was aware of the problems in the previous relationship. Despite a six-month evaluation process by the customer, the new outsourcer needed to ensure that the nine-month transition to their operations was flawless. The delivery team needed to meet the expectations agreed by the deal team.
The outsourcing contract comprised six primary deliverables over the first two years. The client expected the supplier’s operation of their business processes to deliver rapid, tangible process improvements. However, early signs of misalignment between the customer and the new outsourcer’s delivery team appeared.
Recognizing the need for a rapid and rigorous way to clarify and solve the situation, an independent consultant using the SchellingPoint software was brought in.
The Solution
Over 30 executives, managers, and key players in the client and the outsourcer participated. Within two hours, the virtual dialogue among them surfaced over 150 views and opinions on the contract and the transition.
The alignment analytics illustrated that the outsourcing team saw necessary process improvement as requiring the client-side of processes to be matured, too, not just those elements ‘bought’ from the supplier, whereas the customers mostly expected no effort should be required to ‘transfer’ the process from the incumbent to the new outsourcer.
Further, the outsourcer’s prioritization of initiatives to upgrade process excellence across the process lifecycle was silently rejected by the customer’s leaders, by assigning lower priorities to its staff’s activities and meetings.
Concurrently, unbeknownst to both the outsourcing team and the client’s management team, the senior client executive weighted one of the six deliverables as “If this one doesn’t happen, the rest doesn’t matter.” This focus was a new perspective, not heard during the purchasing process.
The Result
After identifying these disconnects, the client explicitly acknowledged that they needed to participate in process improvement, and all parties agreed to publish a revised set of project priorities.
Removing re-contracting roadblocks before the renewal process.
The Situation
Large IT outsourcing contracts are typically complex, imperfect, collaborations. They can deliver immense value for customers and outsourcers alike, but the experience can be challenging for all involved. In one case, in year eight of a ten-year contract, the F500 client started to discuss the contract’s renewal and the need to go back out for competitive bids. The global BPO firm’s account executive was concerned that her client would not automatically renew the next years, in year nine, and prepare to find and move to after year ten concludes.
The Requirement
The Account Executive hired an independent consultant using the SchellingPoint software to gain a complete and accurate understanding of the state of the relationship and pinpoint the cause for concern not being surfaced during regular account meetings.
The Solution
18 client and outsourcer managers participated. In less than two hours, the alignment analytics revealed worrying sentiments and differences of opinion across these stakeholders. Despite formal, regular contract performance reporting saying things were ok, some customer personnel believed that certain contract KPI’s were consistently not met. They did not believe the outsourcer was accurately reporting certain KPI’s and felt their concerns had been ignored several years before and treated all subsequent updates as invalid.
Also, though the outsourcer had taken full control of the client’s processes and run them for five years, they were being judged negatively for inadequate innovation during that period.
Further, within certain groups, the customer’s sentiment was that they expected best practices from the outsourcer, yet it seemed they were ‘Doing it for the first time.’
On the other hand, customer personnel acknowledged that they were imperfect, but could not admit to problems they caused for fear that the outsourcer would use the honesty against them in future negotiations. This holding back led to operational weaknesses going unresolved, or the wrong remedy applied.
The Result
These and other issues were surfaced and pinpointed using SchellingPoint analytics. The root issues were reviewed with the customer and outsourcer’s IT and process leadership.
It transpired that the false KPI reporting was indeed accurate, and the client had been incorrect in their negative judgment of the outsourcer’s reporting flaws. The different expectations of innovation and business process excellence were resolved, and new agreements made.
The customer did not go out to rebid and confidently signed a multi-year renewal with the outsourcer.
Removing a bottleneck in a national policy implementation.
The Situation
After meeting quarterly for two years, 50 stakeholders from the US government, industry, academia, and environmental NGO’s, are unable to agree upon an implementation plan of a new federal policy for sustainable packaging.
The Requirement
Having become stuck, with internal methods and external consultants unable to break the deadlock, a management consulting using SchellingPoint frames is hired, based on their prior success with other public sector groups.
The Solution
From the group’s anonymous two-hour virtual dialogue, six previously unrecognized points of complete agreement surface. This information reassures the group and becomes the foundation for their policy implementation plan.
There are, however, several remaining misalignments, several unknown, several experienced. A root inference is that the known differences of opinion are between demographic groups, (e.g. for-profit companies disagreeing with environmental NGOs) and thus blocked by intransigent core values.
Using the 3 Reasons for Misalignment model, this rational inference is found to be inaccurate with weaker alignment within each demographic group than across them. This previously unavailable insight enables the conversations to be reshaped. The most contentious issues debated in earlier meetings are resolved in a four-hour meeting by sharing new data and information around the mistaken inference.
The Result
The national policy group assembles a fully supported plan within twelve weeks. This plan leads to the formation of a 501c(3), successful fundraising, hiring an Executive Director, and an organizational launch that draws the attention of stakeholders in sustainable packaging from over 1,000 organizations in more than 45 countries.
Retaining market leadership through customer-centric service policies.
The Situation
A leading financial services firm feels its success is partially due to its use of automation and technology to support its customers ahead of its competition. However, their current customer portfolio and market direction have both changed since they set that vision. The leadership team decides it is time to refresh their customer service policies to maintain their relevance and lead.
The Requirement
A management consulting using SchellingPoint is hired to help them revisit their customer vision and ensure it is up-to-date and correct.
As a federally regulated financial services firm, the organization’s interactions with customers, in-person and virtually, are dictated by multiple regulatory controls. Their requirement is how to meet their regulatory restrictions and risk management policies while providing the strongest, most efficient 1-to-1 experience.
The leadership team sees several questions they need to answer. For example, how do you support a customer’s desire for you to be ‘their advocate’? How do you define and implement their desire for you to ‘be consultative’? How do you implement ‘friendly’ when you cannot, for regulatory reasons, fully satisfy a request? How do you define the answers to such questions in a way that can be scaled across your customer-facing organization and accommodate different customer interests?
The Solution
The board, leadership team, and first level of company management first participate in a two-hour virtual dialogue where they express their opinions on 19 dimensions of a customer service vision. This surfaces 154 unique, relevant opinions within this community on this topic.
The pattern of the conversations is around taking an organization that has built its position on efficient, low-cost, operational excellence – which in most areas requires a one-size-fits-all strategy – to providing personalization in a world where regulations and policies apply to all.
In two workshops, the board, leadership team, and managers use Collaborative Design techniques, part of the Advanced Consulting Skills, to both virtually and in-person, innovate their approaches for implementing greater personalization within their operations.
The Result
A three-prong set of policy changes are crafted, with associated technology plans. Viewed as sufficient to maintain their lead in customer-centricity, the roadmap is endorsed by the board and built into their two-year business plan.
Finding out that the things we take for granted others do not.
The Situation
Over 20 years, the company has become the leader in its niche. They decide it is necessary to formalize the relationships with their growing partner base. A seven-person team is set up to clarify the company’s partnering strategy. Six months into their discussions, the team is stuck, struggling to resolve disagreement among themselves around various objectives of the partnering strategy.
The Requirement
Familiar with the use of SchellingPoint, the team hires a management consultant using SchellingPoint to get them past their differences and complete the partnering strategy.
The Solution
The seven team members and several company executives participate in a two-hour virtual dialogue on the partnering strategy. Immediately, the analytics show two core assumptions about the partnering strategy around which the seven are completely misaligned. Importantly, these two opinions had never been stated in any of their conversations, being implicit beliefs driving several of the group’s other misaligned opinions.
One non-aligned assumption is discussed and turned into an agreed assumption by the team themselves. The second is taken to the company’s leadership team, who make a policy decision and place a stake-in-the-ground by which the team could make decisions.
The Result
Within one week of starting the process, the team’s blockages are removed, and they complete the partnering strategy for presentation to the leadership team.
Fixing the tactics to support the revised strategy.
The Situation
As part of ongoing cost reductions in IT, a management consulting firm is hired to recommend how to transition to ITIL. Multiple IT support and service departments in locations around the world are reorganized under a single ITIL model and centralized leadership.
Six months after go-live, there is a deep dissatisfaction within large parts of the internal customer base – the businesspeople, and IT’s front-line support managers and technical staff.
Further process changes are made. Then leadership and project team members are changed, with no material improvement. The CIO determines that she needs to go outside to get the answer.
The Requirement
A management consulting firm using SchellingPoint is hired to find the root issues and design a plan for the ITIL process model to attain its original objectives.
The Solution
Over 80 IT managers and staff across the globe, involved in the design and implementation of the ITIL program, participate in a two-hour virtual dialogue, including management consultants with deep IT domain expertise who contribute opinions about ITIL projects.
The overall design of the reorganization was deemed appropriate; however, several implementation tactics were concluded to be incomplete. For example, the client is unaware of several common tensions created in such operating model changes. They were not forewarned by the consultants who had proposed the strategy about these tensions now present within the user and support community.
Further, in the new operating model, several important decision-making and escalation policies were unstated. The definition of new roles and responsibilities were unclear to many. Too many IT leaders did not agree with the original stated Case for Action, leading to a lack of commitment and conviction at sensitive times when they were on the frontline of adjusting internal customer expectations.
The Result
Within two weeks, these and other issues are validated and mitigating solutions designed and implemented to bring the revised processes to required performance levels.
Pinpointing where to advance a successful corporate initiative.
The Situation
A global manufacturing company implements an Operations Center of Excellence to improve supply chain operational performance. Through knowledge sharing, best practices, and training programs, the center’s charter is to ensure over 30 global plants maximize their production quality, cycle-times, cost, and labor efficiency.
The Requirement
After the first year, the center leader needs to understand the plant’s reactions to the program to determine where improvement is required and what the next stage of work should comprise. A management consulting firm using SchellingPoint is hired to conduct the assessment and help the Center of Excellence team assemble their roadmap.
The Solution
One hundred and twelve plant executives, managers, and leaders across the globe participate in the review.
Through their anonymous two-hour virtual dialogue, this group expresses 138 unique opinions about the initiative. They cover its purpose, what is working, what is not, where improvements should are required, and nine other aspects of the program.
Indicating strong, broad support for the program overall, the alignment and sentiment analytics allow center leadership to pinpoint 37 issues and new needs. For example, the analytics illustrated misunderstandings around factors such as mandatory versus optional training, inaccurate expectations around CoE resource roles, and preferences for different support models.
The Result
Through four 2-hour interactions, the five-person program leadership team assemble a Year 2 plan to build on the solid base established in Year 1.
Providing a major process redesign with unquestionable executive sponsorship.
The Situation
The leadership of a global manufacturing company organized as six business units determines they can no longer afford six different versions of the product development lifecycle.
The Requirement
The business unit leaders are tasked to standardize the process across the enterprise, accommodating localization only where essential. As part of the Define step of Six Sigma’s DMAIC model, a management consultant using SchellingPoint is hired to clarify the scope, charter, assumptions, expectations, and concerns of the program amongst the business unit’s leaders.
The Solution
12 R&D leaders from corporate and the business units fly into London for a two-day workshop. The two-hour virtual dialogue takes place on the morning of day one. Over lunch, the analytics are used to pinpoint which conversations are required and in what sequence.
In the afternoon of day one, inaccurate and non-aligned assumptions underlying the project are resolved. Outcome clarification starts towards the end of day one and concludes the morning of day two. In the afternoon of day two, constraint removal is conducted. All 12 SVP’s and VP’s participate in the dialogues, identifying synergies and reconciling conflicts.
For example, the virtual dialogue showed a concern that scientists and R&D professionals will feel that standardization will cause them to become generalists rather than specialists, leading to damaging attrition. The concern arose due to different interpretations of the term ‘standardize.’
Also, some business unit leaders see standardized process as an inhibitor to creativity and that their staff would become confined to fulfilling predefined tasks. The others accepted that their local version of the innovation process had developed over time but was not necessarily adding unique value, and therefore, defining common core innovation processes could still allow for high levels of creativity by talented individuals, but within a manageable framework.
Examples of how the process would define what should be done, in ways that also showed the potential for creativity in the outputs, allowed the group to set aside the concern and provided the material for preempting this concern in the communications process.
The Result
At a board meeting two weeks later, the group’s 47-activity roadmap received $110M funding for 18 Lean/Six Sigma-based workstreams impacting 4,000 personnel. The three-year standardization goals were met by the end of year one.
Maximizing alignment with your customers and non-customers to drive adoption.
The Situation
A market-leading software company is working on the business case and high-level design for their next-generation solution architecture. As with any such exercise, the business case is based on assumptions about the market conditions for the updated version of a popular product; those of current customers, those who chose the competitor’s products, and potential new buyers. Product Management’s analysis contrasts the capabilities and value inherent in the currently available solution with the market’s unmet needs, predicted needs, and innovations ideas.
The Requirement
Before presenting the business case to executive leadership, product management seeks market validation of their ideas. They also want an answer to the board’s expected question, “What do we not know that we don’t know?” A consulting firm using SchellingPoint is hired to perform the market validation exercise.
The Solution
Three hundred thirty customer users and decision-makers, competitors’ customers, non-users, industry influencers, and implementation partners participate in a 3-step, 90-minute virtual dialogue to express their attitudes on the solution space. This research is done without revealing the next-generation architecture’s details or that there is a next-generation product on the horizon.
Product management is pleased to see most of its core assumptions validated. However, two are not. They are significant assumptions that require an adjustment to the solution plans and the business case.
Also of immense value, is learning what would prevent current customers, competitor’s customers, and non-users from adopting the new solution when it becomes available. Similarly, the virtual dialogue data and explanations identify how the product changes would cause concerns that prevent upgrades and adoption.
The Result
These insights were used by product management, marketing, sales, and R&D to develop mitigating solutions to the market’s expressed concerns. SchellingPoint’s cluster analysis identified the characteristics of like-minded companies, which led to sales qualification checklists and presentations customized to the different market sectors.
The next-generation product has been in the market for three years.
Efficiently enabling leaders to gain value from collaboration.
The Situation
19 non-competing technology CEOs agree to meet periodically. Their objective, as a set of leaders in similar situations, is to learn from and help each other with ideas and advice. After a year of events, the implementation of the concept is proving unsatisfactory to several of the CEOs.
The Requirement
A CEO familiar with SchellingPoint recommends they have a consultant using SchellingPoint work with them to fix the think tank’s problem and get everyone aligned around a revised set of objectives, roles, program strategy, and operating model.
The Solution
The 19 CEOs conduct the 3-step virtual dialogue online, taking less than two hours over a week. Meeting online, they spend 30 minutes reviewing the analytics and visualizations of their view and opinions.
A core team of five CEOs uses the insights to pinpoint the discussions that will put the think tank on the right path. Of the 26 issues raised, 11 are deemed critical to future success and preventing CEO’s leaving the think tank.
The Result
In a 4-hour meeting led by the consultant using the SchellingPoint software and skills, the full CEO group resolves their key issues. Primarily, these lead to changes in the details of how their events are conducted – the facilitation, dialogue, and interaction approaches.
The adjustments are implemented in the next meeting, and the think tank goes on to operate with every member’s participation.
Making change decisions based upon data rather than anecdote.
The Situation
A national association of CEOs and board members is experiencing high satisfaction ratings with their annual conferences but wants to further perfect their cost/content proposition. With over 30 years of experience running the CEO conferences, with multiple conferences per year, and a stable conference organizing team, there is no shortage of opinion as to what should stay the same, and what should change.
While these views have driven successful continuous improvement of the conference product sold and delivered by the association, two board members are making strong declarations as to two changes that should be made.
The Requirement
The chairman of the board asks the conference team to validate his colleagues’ protestations, which other board members disagree with and the conference team staff are split on. The conference team leader hires a management consultant using SchellingPoint to learn the merits of the two suggestions.
The Solution
A ‘conference value improvement’ virtual dialogue is conducted with the 1,400 association member CEOs, the conference team, and the board members. The two change suggestions are hidden within the 143 views and opinions on receiving optimum value from the conferences expressed by the CEO community.
The virtual dialogue analytics, including CEO’s reasoning for and against the changes, does not support the two leadership team member’s opinions. Presented with this data, they acknowledge that their views, whose origins are a small number of the member CEOs, are not widespread.
However, the data also shows an unexpected, previously unknown, negative attitude towards certain events and activities.
The Result
The insights lead to changes in conference organization and events. The association CEO reports that within two months when marketing the next conference, the project pays for itself.
Healthcare leaders collaborate to improve patient outcomes and constrain expenses growth.
The Situation
Three healthcare systems leaders foresee increasing federal requirements for quality of care transparency that will lead to additional data collection and reporting costs. They propose bringing hospitals, physicians, and insurers together state-wide to use the new data to improve the quality of hospital care, but in a way that will offset the cost increases through collaboration, rather than each working independently.
The Requirement
A management consulting firm using SchellingPoint is hired to lead the formation of the coalition. This coalition will be the first time payors and providers in the state collaborate in this manner, so the process needs to mitigate the natural conflicts between payors and providers.
The Solution
Reaching out to CEO’s at other state hospital systems, 15 state interest. 32 C-level executives from the eighteen organizations participate in a two-hour, 3-step, virtual dialogue over a month.
The results reveal the group possesses a surprising 16 shared objectives for metrics and reporting collaboration.
However, 29 concerns are raised by the potential members as to why such an alliance will not succeed. For example, the hospitals do not use the same algorithm for calculating healthcare metrics with the same name. How could they find one algorithm to which they would all switch? And if they did, that new quality data could be misused to compete against each other.
These and 27 other constraints are validated and mitigated using virtual Collaborative Design, enabled by the SchellingPoint technology, through eight one-hour virtual meetings of the CxOs.
The Result
The alliance is formed with all 18 founding parties endorsing the principles and charter. The alliance meets its first-year objectives to define metrics and create a shared reporting hub. Within four years, participation grows to over 210 member hospitals across the state.
Measurable improvement in patient care metrics occurs, and through their collaboration, the alliance co-develops a unique set of care data and practice knowledge.
Using alignment to accelerate innovation in a strategic alliance.
The Situation
A product research firm entered into a co-development relationship with a consumer-packaged-goods (CPG) company. Three years into the 10-year contract, there are mixed emotions within both parties towards the relationship’s output.
The Requirement
The CPG company’s head of alliances is responsible for planning the Year 4 relationship review, involving senior leaders from both organizations. He wants to break out of the standard governance process and re-ground the alliance for the balance of the contract.
He hires a management consultant using SchellingPoint to lead the process and find a mutually agreeable plan for the next three years of the relationship.
The Solution
Forty-eight leaders, managers, and staff actively involved in the R&D co-development work participate in their virtual dialogue, using SchellingPoint’s Strategic Alliance Strategy and Innovation Strategy templates.
The visualizations of the group’s analytics highlight two deep problems in the relationship. Negative beliefs held about each other’s R&D capabilities, by those required to conduct the relationship but who were not involved in constructing it, are undermining information sharing. Each other, unknowingly, is trying to work from incomplete information, compromising their abilities to innovate.
At the same time, different interpretations of innovation expectations are shown to be causing tension around decision-making in the product development stage-gate process.
The Result
The 19 relationship leaders and operational managers from both organizations engage in a one-day workshop. They review their mutual competency and capability models and produce a revised role, responsibilities, and RACI structure within the relationship to increase the flow of information. Related, they identify six levels of innovation to smooth out project flow through the stage-gate process.
Strengthening partner understanding to maintain mutual growth.
The Situation
Two companies are collaborating in a strategic alliance in an emerging sector in their industry. Through their joint business development efforts, the relationship is providing each organization with a significant incremental revenue stream. However, an acquisition made by one of the partners introduces a competitive relationship between other parts of their two businesses, causing some leaders to want the alliance to end.
The Requirement
The Strategic Alliances team determines that the scope of the impact has gone beyond a small group ‘talking it out in a meeting.’ They hire a management consultant using SchellingPoint to facilitate the best path forward, recognizing the new co-opetition dynamics.
The Solution
Thirty-seven executives, functional leaders, and team leaders across both organizations participate. The analytics of their virtual dialogue indicates that their overall success has been masking some spoken and unspoken concerns about the health and direction of the relationship.
At a two-day offsite, their alignment around shared views of the market opportunity, the value of their combined solutions, and the methods for going to market are highlighted. In fact, some of the positive insights lead to ‘We didn’t realize that you felt that way too.’ Reactions. These are followed up in a series of joint meetings.
However, the unexpected misalignments are compromising trust and respect for each other, exasperated by the one partner’s acquisition. Negative rumors within the companies, and inaccurate inferences about the intentions of the acquisition, being made by some key stakeholders, are identified, surfaced, and resolved – releasing the tension and unease that was growing but difficult to discuss.
The Result
With the air cleared, communications designed to explain how the co-opetition will work, and adjustments to the partnering strategy, the partnership continues its growth.
Transformation is the act of designing and making large changes to all or parts of an organization to bring it to a new level of performance. Most of the projects highlighted in this Case Studies page were labeled a transformation by the client and the consultants involved.
See:
And here is a transformation that would be at home in several of the categories above:
Assembling the First Global Coordinated Pediatric Healthcare Innovation Strategy
The Situation
In the United States, 8% of patients are children. Almost all pharmaceutical and medical device R&D is aimed at adult patients. In children’s hospitals, nurses and physicians spend the little spare time they possess, working out how to dose adult medicines for children, and how to re-engineer adult devices down to child sizes.
Innovation does occur, however it is almost entirely by individual nurses and physicians within their hospital system.
The Requirement
Dr. Anthony Chang, Chief Intelligence and Innovation Officer, Sharon Disney Lund Medical Intelligence and Innovation Institute (I3) at the Children’s Hospital of Orange County is a leader in pediatric cardiac care.
Dr. Chang decides to invite his peer innovation officers to come together and create a network of collaborating children’s hospitals and physicians. A management consultant using SchellingPoint is hired to help the group assemble a globally coordinated pediatric healthcare innovation strategy.
The Solution
21 Chief Innovation Officers from children’s hospitals in Harvard to Hawaii, Seattle to Barcelona, Atlanta to The Vatican, accept Dr. Chang’s invitation. The expert community anonymously express over 130 opinions on the subject in their virtual dialogue, prior to a two-day launch workshop in Orange County, CA.
The full internal and external hospital innovation system is covered to ensure nothing is missed. How do physicians from two hospitals collaborate on a research paper when the system is designed to reward only one author? What do hospitals need to do to make more time available for innovation? How do innovators collaborate best across the globe?
The Result
A three-tier strategy was assembled, working outwards from the innovating physicians and nurses, through the hospital system, to the greater healthcare system.
Within one year, the I3 innovation community, launched with the 21 innovation officers, grew to over 60 members, and currently has over 200 physicians collaborating in and between organized innovation events.
Use of the Alignment Drift Correction activity to ensure a shared goal is reached.
The Situation
A group of former colleagues established a new professional services firm. Over the next five years, they earned a strong reputation in their industry, leading to high-growth and multi-million-dollar revenues.
The Requirement
The colleagues had set the operating structure up as contractors and freelancers. Their personal income would come from a combination of individual and group-based distributions from profits. The sales growth called for an increasing amount of time to be spent by some founders on governance, marketing, sales, and other overhead activities. Growing organizational expenses were also required, placing additional stress on the original compensation structure. Further, at this same time, there was growing speculation the US government would change the tax treatments for full-time contractors.
The Solution
The leadership team was advised the organization should convert over to an employee-based structure. This implied pros and cons common to every contractor-owner, plus lesser and greater implications for each individual.
An agreed strategy, with conditions and timing for conversion, was assembled using the SchellingPoint process. A year later, the group used the Alignment Drift Correction to identify where prior thoughts had shifted and new thinking had arisen. The changes were prioritized, discussed, and the conversion agreement was reconfirmed, with minimal adjustments.
The Result
Eighteen months later, the still-growing firm was successfully acquired. 95% of the contractors converted to employees at the acquiring company.
How better technique makes the difference between ‘Looks right’ and ‘Is right’.
The Situation
A new leader took responsibility for the R&D function of a global B2B products company. She came in at a time when the organization was being criticized for being too profit-motivated.
The Requirement
The R&D executive wanted her senior leaders to discuss their approach to being customer-centric as a way to clarify what she saw as an important strategy, and as a way to get to know her new team.
The Solution
The leader reached out to the company’s internal consulting group, who assigned an internal consultant to lead the revision of the R&D customer-centricity strategy. In preparation for a two-day team offsite, the consultant conducted one-on-one stakeholder interviews of the 14 executives, managers, and R&D specialists.
This coincided with the internal consulting team being trained on the SchellingPoint methods and tools. The consultant determined his conventional interview technique had gathered 55 unique opinions. After revisiting each stakeholder with the SchellingPoint method, the group had expressed 169 opinions.
This increase was prompted by using the Opinion Interview opinion-gathering method, with the four root opinions people possess, to cover the sixteen themes representing the ‘system of the topic’, ranging from the Customer Perspective, Needs, Value, and Frustrations to their Role in the R&D lifecycle.
The Result
The consultant used the SchellingPoint process to conduct the workshop. The stakeholders’ opinions were organized using the Outside In and GUBA frames to pinpoint the necessary conversations and their sequence. The group assembled an R&D customer-centricity strategy to guide their function supporting the organization’s customer-centricity strategy.
The cases above are a sample of the hundreds conducted and are unlikely to exactly reflect your unique situation.
Please contact us, and we will find the case most closely resembling it.