A Collaborative Approach to Complex Business Challenges

Structured Visual Thinking™ is a cooperative process to tackle important business issues by viewing the entire business as an interconnected system. It encourages shared responsibility and streamlines informed decision-making, ultimately leading to the efficient implementation of strategies.

Three Key Phases:

1. Context Analysis: Gain a comprehensive understanding of the situation and gather relevant information to establish a solid foundation for addressing business challenges.

2. Strategic Framework Development: Craft a tailored program and framework that empowers the leadership team to make well-informed, high-quality decisions.

3. Implementation Support: Provide the tools, techniques, deliverables, and resources to ensure the successful execution of chosen strategies.

How it Works In Summary:

1. Start with a clear challenge: Define the "exam question" or central issue without bias, ensuring an unbiased discussion starting point.

2. Conduct surveys and assessments: Collect and analyze data to understand the organisation's current state and contextualize the problem. Free Surveys

3. Develop customized frameworks: Combine client information and contextual research to create tailored frameworks to address the specific challenge.

4. Design a program of work: Outline a comprehensive plan detailing the steps and expectations at each stage of the process.

5. Engage the right people: Involve key decision-makers and influencers to contribute to the analysis and decision-making.

6. Transfer confidence and ownership: Ensure participants understand and take responsibility for the outcomes of the process.

7. Create the right environment: Utilize large-scale visualization in suitable spaces to facilitate interactive engagement and holistic consideration of all factors.

8. Translate content into actionable tools: Convert the generated content into practical deliverables, such as blueprints and frameworks, to guide execution and sustain commitment.

9. Monitor progress and adjust as needed: Track the implementation of agreed-upon strategies, assess alignment with the original intent, and adjust as necessary to maintain focus and adapt to changing circumstances.

Framework Science™ And The Online Platform

This approach is grounded in two decades of experience, incorporating evidence-based principles and patterns into a robust platform. The platform offers tools and techniques to accelerate insight gathering, maintain the integrity of frameworks built in collaborative sessions, and sustain the impact of commitments over time.

While optional, adopting the platform can provide significant advantages for clients in managing their structured visual thinking initiatives.

The Detail

It begins with a principle. 

Let’s avoid solving the wrong problem really well. 

And that's the first principle for a good reason - most organisations do it. It’s not intentional, but it’s hard to be objective. We want to make the best strategies and plans to achieve business outcomes.

Our approach is collaborative and conversational. It challenges, in a highly engaging way, leadership teams to step back and consider the future as a complete system*.

*Businesses are a complete system with many moving parts - and if you want to be successful, they must work together in harmony.

Whatever the business challenge, our framework approach will answer it. And a considerable benefit is that everyone will own it. And that’s also deliberate because we are not consultants searching for a long-term dependency.

The Strategy Copilot

Over the last decade, we’ve been designing an online platform. 

Recently we’ve been using it with clients to allow them to continue to keep the conversations alive and make sure what was agreed upon gets delivered. It is optional because clients are already software and application-heavy.

But we do hope that clients will adopt it as there are many advantages.

ONE: The program starts with a core team understanding and agreeing on the exam question - the challenge described. The exam question mustn't begin to answer itself in the phrasing as that will bias the conversations. 

The Right Context

TWO: Simultaneously, we kick off surveys and assessments to gain an understanding and baseline of the current state.

THREE: We receive and analyse all the information available from the client. Together with that, we will research the operation's context. And as a result, start to build the frameworks that will answer the exam question.

FOUR: At this point, we start to design the program of work. The full plan that will play out from end to end explains what we will be doing and expecting at each stage. We can rapidly configure the frameworks based on experience, but each case is unique.

No two frameworks are ever alike.

The Right Stakeholders

FIVE: A key part of answering the exam question is having the right people fully engaged in answering it. Our criteria for that are simple - anyone who can help make the key decisions, either directly or influential, in bringing the best thinking and arguments to bear.

Our intention with those involved is to transfer confidence, understanding and ownership of the result.

Another important factor in answering the exam question has the right space within which to consider all the moving parts. 

SIX: We work at a large scale, in big rooms that are suitable for leadership teams and large-scale visualisation. This visualisation is developed in real-time, directly interacting with everyone in the room. 

SEVEN: The intervention sessions deliver considerable value. They also produce a significant amount of content. That content is immediately translated into tools and frameworks we describe as key deliverables at this stage. 

These are the blueprints and frameworks - tools and equipment that power the teams to deliver and sustain execution.

Sustaining Execution

EIGHT: Once the frameworks and blueprints are created, the real value of this approach is clear to everyone involved. We can then track the integrity of what emerged from the session based on what was agreed upon. 

NINE: Through self-assessment and comparison techniques, we can help the team stay on track, remain accurate to the spirit of the earlier sessions, and adjust when dynamics change or fresh challenges appear.

**Framework Science™ is based on two decades of insight and learning.

We’ve taken all the evidence from all the cases and developed the mechanics, principles and patterns. We’ve codified them within the platform. They’ve enabled us to create tools and techniques to accelerate the gathering of insight, maintain the integrity of the frameworks that teams build in the sessions and the ability to sustain the effect of the commitments made over time.