We are a hybrid strategy consultancy and design agency

Today’s leader faces the pressure of remaining competitive, profitable, and relevant while managing day-to-day processes efficiently and effectively.

When faced with challenging disruptions, the combination of urgency and complexity demands extraordinary focus.

Innovation Arts brings the structure, process, experience and tools necessary to help leaders navigate complexity, crystallise vision and strategy, innovate, align their peers, and engage their organisation in executing change.

We offer strategic leadership support that enables your team to maintain a high-level, systemic focus on your strategic and cultural objectives during times of disruption.

We don’t analyse your business, formulate a strategy, and deliver it to you to execute. Instead, we work with you and your leadership team to bring your own expertise to bear on your own challenges. Typically, this starts with a conversation, helping your leadership team define those challenges together and to anticipate and resolve pressing issues.

We can then support you in co-designing a programme of interventions that will generate ideas, innovations and robust solutions while sustaining direction and momentum.

We catalyse specific organisational change through the design and facilitation of large-group collaborative DesignSessions.

Working alongside you, we bring the necessary diverse stakeholders together to collaborate and accelerate decision making on complex problems.

These are high-impact, structured and facilitated interventions with specific objectives. They are co-designed with you and used at specific points within a complex programme to deliver substantial transformation, alignment and clarity. Stakeholders leave these sessions with a sense of ownership for the actionable solutions that they have designed, tested and aligned upon.

Our facilitation team captures the conversation live throughout, giving you a comprehensive and visually engaging record of the discussions, issues and outcomes.

Our DesignSessions cover the full spectrum of C-Suite needs from Strategy Formulation and Operating Model redesign to Values and Behaviours. They are as suitable for treating the long term strategy view, as for short term disruption response and programme alignment.

Objectives inevitably vary according to complexity and the number of critical stakeholders implicated. A typical session is of 3 days duration with up to 120 participants. A focused one day session will involve 40 participants or fewer.

All Innovation Arts’ collaborative sessions address complex challenges and catalyse change through the application of Design Thinking, enabled by Whole-System Facilitation in our purpose-designed Flexible Environment.

We support your project management teams throughout the programme lifecycle in a way that enables and supports your existing resources. We do this through the practical application of Design Thinking and agile programme management.

Our Project Design Leads apply an agile framework that ensures your teams progress, maintain momentum, and continue to prioritise activity based on strategic objectives, whilst managing interdependences.

We use short-cycle working and iterative feedback loops to ensure that the connection between programme leadership and project execution teams is light and responsive, helping you identify early, and resolve effectively, the barriers to progress, integration and alignment.

The systemic multi-level overview provides the long-term focus while streams’ progress is measured and shared via visual management and tailored communications.

The drum-beat of your programme can also be augmented by small facilitated meetings or short WorkSessions for collaborative issue resolution and tactical management of interdependences.

In every engagement we ensure your teams learn from the experience: from documentation of best practice to agile working practices, our programme support helps embed learning into your organisation.

Designing alongside your communications and engagement teams, Innovation Arts can help you ensure sustained engagement by maintaining a coherent, visually engaging narrative across programme communications, and out to the wider enterprise.

From powerful communications to cascade decisions make in DesignSessions to long-term management of the communications stream around a programme, we can support internal and external communications, communities of practice, cross-media planning, timing and impact measurement.

Where cultural change is required we draw on Games Science to embed values and behaviours.

We use InfoMurals to help show the progression of thinking, the focal narrative of a shared journey, and as a way of telling our story to others.

InfoMurals develop in a more planned way than graphic recording, allowing more structure to be built in to the story we want to tell as a whole. They consolidate key elements, incorporating a distinctive beginning, middle and either an end or a vision…

InfoMurals create the most impact over the course of multiple days, at conferences or over the course of a DesignSession. Many of our clients go on to use the resulting output as a cornerstone of the communications programme.

Animations are an excellent contemporary approach to storytelling, allowing a blend of narration and visual anchoring to grab your audience’s attention and create real impact.

We often use animations to help clients introduce a new concept, change or disruption. They can make the unfamilar feel familiar, or the complex feel more approachable. Effective stories need to be concise and memorable, making animations great for reaching wide audiences with strategic messages.

Animations are being used more and more by our clients to realise the impact of sparking the imagination of the organisation. They can act as a call to arms or a rallying cry to get the power of an organisation behind a shared vision. They excite, enable and embed our beliefs, aspirations and ideas.

Rich pictures are an excellent way of presenting detailed, complex content in a visually engaging way. They can communicate the scale and complexity of your programme or initiative, and everyone’s place within it.

Structurally, Rich Pictures must be accurate in portraying all elements of the system and the relationships between them, so your people see themselves within the visual in a way that speaks to the heart of your organisation.

That’s why building a Rich Picture starts with our Designers working with key stakeholders to understand the detailed content and the context of what you need to communicate. Getting this right provides the robust base to our creative approach, ensuring your Rich Picture is both stylistically engaging and powerful.

Whether you are pitching an idea, simplifying a presentation, a roadmap, or defining a vision; investing time and effort upfront in the drafting and development stage of a Rich Picture will enable you to effortlessly talk through different concepts and their relationships as a systemic whole.

Graphic Recording (also called ‘scribing’) brings conversations and presentations to life by capturing ideas and themes through real-time illustration.

Our team of highly skilled Graphic Artists are proficient at prioritising content, synthesising conversations, and defining the core topic of a complex discussion in a way that brings the content to life.

The end product is a visually engaging output that facilitates recall and reflection on the narrative of the day, and sharing with others who were not there.

The theatre of having your ideas visualised right in front of you never fails to inspire and excite, and Graphic Recording makes an excellent addition to any workshop, off-site, away day or conference, creating a central visual piece that participants can congregate around and continue to discuss their points of view further.