Thrive in flux

Building the resilience and adaptation capacity of leaders and team members to harness their attention, manage their energy and strategically simplify.

Building a culture to harness the best of human attention

How do you harness the best of human attention, and challenge the culture of unproductive busyness and distraction?

Worked with a multinational to reimagine office life based around attention. Using employee culture conversations, and a partnership with researchers in a leading university, we established a clear understanding of the principles of attention management. We built rituals and expectations which prioritized focus and immersion over overload and partial attention. The office became a national example of best practice; receiving over 10,000 visitors per year to experience the environment.

Improving group conversations across an organization

Improving the quality of group conversations across an organization so people think better together in a way that encourages thriving through transformation.

How often have any of us felt our group meetings were sub-par; and yet, at times of massive transformation, we need better conversations to share perspectives, generate better ideas, and support each other. We identified facilitation as a critical leadership capability for the whole organization to enable the collaboration that can enable transformation. Built a robust framework of the Facilitators Mindset and Practices. Also an extensive curriculum and toolkit for core and advanced facilitation skills. Developed a Facilitation Lab for people to come, learn, practice and receive feedback on their abilities. This proved to have one of the highest level of NPS and NSAT with one of the lowest cost per participant in the global organization. In the space of two years we established a global community of practice for passionate leader-facilitators across the whole business.

Fostering Global Leadership Connectedness

How do you foster better cross-functional collaboration in complex, large multinationals?

In major multi-nationals, cross-org collaboration can be laborious at best; and conflicts are common. This not only impacts the customer experience, it reduces the spread of insights and learning across the business which characterises the most innovative companies. It is also a significant tax on senior leader time. We identified the high-leverage point for cross-functional effectiveness was senior leader relationships. Designed a program of development experiences for a population of 2000 of the most senior leaders based around principles of social learning. These involved small peer coaching groups, informal learning cafes, EVP breakthrough project work, and major conferences. The explicit focus here is more than to develop strategic and cultural capability in these leaders, but also to enhance the connectedness of these leaders across the global business. The cross-org relationships accelerated delivery and transformation, generating many examples of a more integrated customer experience. Leaders also experienced the benefit of more peer support (it can be pretty lonely being a leader!)

Delivering rapid adaptation in a way that energizes

Setting up a brand new organization within a massive entertainments giant, to very tight timelines and less resources than were ideal.

Developed a facilitated series of structured sessions with leaders and team members to co-create the plan, and to track delivery and challenges. Through structured conversations the leaders identified goals, needs and challenges and, more importantly, how they would engage their people to explore and address these. Involving team members created a huge amount of energy in the project, and a lot of innovation. The project achieved pre-launch performance figures significantly ahead of deadline; and the levels of engagement and satisfaction were at the upper end of normal throughout the process.

Work with Tony

Who is Tony anyway?

Tony Crabbe is a Business Psychologist who accelerates adaptation in a business and technological environment that just keeps speeding up and getting foggier. He applies the best psychological research to the very latest transformational challenges in a practical and creative way. Curating the conversations that matter to trigger a-has, generate energy and grow change capacity.

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