COLLABORATION CONSULTING

Create better results, faster

-by design

When organisations face challenging disruptions and strategic shifts, the level of complexity involved can quickly demand more than the existing processes and culture can handle. But outsourcing to traditional teams of traditional consultants often leads to solutions that are hard to implement in practice.

Innovation Arts brings a fresh and highly effective approach to tackling these complex problems, acting as a catalyst for the enterprise’s own resources.

Our Collaboration Consulting approaches stimulate and direct your own stakeholders’ intellect and imagination, unleashing their ‘group genius’ through application of collaborative methodologies based on Applied Design Thinking and Whole System Facilitation.

We use a multi-layer approach that acts at each level of the system – top down and bottom up – ensuring alignment and integration for sustainable results.

This means we can:

Delivering clarity and alignment, faster

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.

Close-up of a man's hand writing on a whiteboard during a collaboration consulting workshop by Innovation Arts.

Delivering better decisions, faster

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

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.

Photo showing a group of professional people sitting in a circle during a collaboration consulting workshop by Innovation Arts.

Photo showing a group of professional people sitting in a circle during a collaboration consulting workshop led by Innovation Arts.

Maintaining agility and fitness in complex multi-project programmes

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.

Two people writing on a whiteboards during a consulting workshop led by Innovation Arts.

Provide integrated support for change.

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 Game Science to embed values and behaviours.

Photo showing a big group of professional business people during a collaboration consulting workshop by Innovation Arts.

And all the while freeing your team from the weight of managing the programme itself, so you can benefit from the best of your own resources at each stage of the programme.

There is no ‘off the peg’ solution at Innovation Arts: everything we do is bespoke to each client and their needs, and that’s why we always start with a diagnostic scoping conversation, not a proposal.

These half-day sessions typically bring half a dozen of your critical stakeholders together to dig deeper into the challenges you face, helping you articulate and align on the problem and exploring potential ways forward.