OUR APPROACH
The Five Frames Model
Why, despite the best efforts of your leaders, is your organisation failing to achieve its potential? From our experience of working with businesses in Australia and around the world, in every sector and at just about every stage of the business cycle we believe there are five key, connected elements to maximising your potential.
Understanding how you are currently performing in each part of this system and taking steps to focus there before moving on to your next challenge is key to continual organisational improvement. We can help you think about and improve each of these five areas, framing the solution in a way that maximises the ability of your people to help you succeed.
The Five Frames Model
PURPOSE, VISION AND VALUES
Without a clear organisational purpose, a vision for the future and a set of values to guide you, it is impossible to make decisions on what to do or how to do it. These are the bedrock of any successful organisation – a sense of knowing why you exist and what sort of organisation you aspire to be. Sadly, too often, they end up being overlooked in the annual and monthly cycles of business execution or have been ignored for so long that they are no longer relevant (despite being neatly laminated and stuck on the boardroom wall).
CULTURE
We believe that the culture of your organisation can either constrain or accelerate your ability to execute your strategy effectively.
This is why your strategy should be written with your current culture in mind, but also being mindful of where you could take your culture and how you would do that. The reason many strategies fail is not because the strategy is flawed, but because the organisation is not ready for it or capable of making it work.
Whilst culture can be changed - and more quickly than is generally understood - it takes focus and significant senior effort.
STRATEGY
This is simply your plan to achieve your purpose and vision, designed in accordance with your values. We define an effective strategy as the identified strengths of your organisation, organised to address the situation facing you - in a way that is unique to your organisation.
Increasingly strategy is a fluid concept, not a five year plan enshrined in powerpoint. We can help make sure your strategy is real, unique, understandable and capable of being translated into coordinated actions by your employees.
OPERATING MODEL
This is how you set yourself up to deliver on your strategy, in a way that works for your culture. An operating model is an organisation’s blueprint for how it delivers value, including- organisation design, roles and responsibilities, governance and decision making.
Organisations are under pressure to become increasingly nimble and ensure they have the right capabilities, structures and processes for the future. This is no easy feat and cannot be solved solely through industry benchmarks and methodology. Leaders need to be architects of any changes to their own blueprint, by looking to their vision and strategy for guidance on the changes required to set the organisation up for success.
ALIGN + EXECUTE
Setting yourself up to execute requires significant effort to align leaders and processes at all levels in the organisation. This is the hard work of leadership, continually making sure everyone in your organisation "gets it" and can pull in the same direction as well as shifting key people systems such as reward, performance assessment and promotions. As we move to shorter, more fluid strategy processes and cycles, the effort to ensure everyone understands the current implications and trade-offs that are required cannot be underestimated.
Business success is clearly in the execution, ensuring the right decisions are taken and the right structures, capability, policies, processes and systems are in place to support your strategy and culture. Often, exhausted by the effort to design and communicate an effective plan, organisations fail to convert that plan into a practical, workable set of steps or choose to live with the status quo because change can appear daunting.
THE KEY
TO ONGOING SUCCESS
Finding out if your organisation:
-
is unclear on why it exists or what it stands for
-
doesn’t have a specific, unique, evolving strategy
-
has shared beliefs and norms in conflict with your values
-
isn’t delivering value through your blueprint
-
has people who are unclear on where you’re heading and not enabled to succeed through structure and processes