minerva consulting services
Plymouth
The VUCA environment demands that dispersed organizations are agile – able to
focus, organize and engage people efficiently and effectively as the operating
context changes. Covid-19, resilience and business continuity demands the same.
Beyond the C-19 pandemic; employees will expect more choice in how they work;
regular remote working will become the norm, and Artificial Intelligence will
soon make many current jobs redundant. Agility requires collective leadership
capability – an adaptable, durable enterprise approach to leading and leadership
which develops, executes and evolves strategy in the face of changing context
and unexpected progress while pursuing change, transformation, innovation and
business performance improvement. Agility requires the creation of 'directional
clarity' and 'emotional engagement' on a dynamic basis; this is harder to do in
dispersed and remote working conditions. Yet remote working can enable greater
participation and collaboration as perceived hierarchical power is eliminated
when everyone is a '2 inch box on a screen', and leaders are forced to trust
their people more than they have done. This increases people's feelings of
'psychological safety' which is an essential pre-condition for learning and
changes to ways of working. Distributed leaders in a team of teams make strategy
meaningful to align thinking and priorities; shared leadership, facilitated
de-centralised decision making and collaborative planning harnesses peoples’
expertise and commitment, and releases energy and creative thinking and ideas.
Doing this remotely requires 'meeting leaders' to develop their basic coaching
and facilitation skills while keeping calls focused and minimising 'repetition
and deviation''. Structural agility influences how quickly decisions are made,
and how co-ordination and collaboration are enabled. Rapid reconfiguration is
facilitated by a common approach to defining role-relationships and aligning
accountability and authority (both vertically and laterally). Influence, not
'telling' is essential in human relationships, and roles lacking
accountability-authority alignment, are ultimately untenable. Our approach to
decision-making practice , informed by and combined with digital exploitation,
builds cognitive and competitive advantage. VUCA - Volatility, Uncertainty,
Complexity, Ambiguity; a term first used in the US Army War College, 1987.
Practical, Scalable, Adaptable Initiatives Embedded with Speed and Accuracy We
are a network of experienced senior consulting, business, public sector and
academic professionals. Our mission is to provide clients with cost-effective,
scalable, coherent and sustainable leadership, transformational change and
organization design solutions; in order to address and exploit the strategy,
digital, resilience and people challenges and opportunities facing enterprises.
The speed, accuracy, economy and effectiveness with which we deliver results set
us apart from process-driven and high cost alternatives. With a track record of
innovative, pragmatic and effective delivery, the difference we bring is in our
depth of understanding, speed of response and cost-effectiveness. We operate
without ‘administrative drag’, but with the experience and wisdom to understand
our client sectors and the understanding of leadership, strategy execution and
culture change gained from personal experience of ‘doing it’ rather than
‘advising about it’. Our ethos stems from our backgrounds of service and
motivation to 'add value'. We harness ICT and our network to disrupt large
consultancies. We ‘horizon scan’, think strategically and personally lead
tactical delivery with speed, accuracy, agility and practical fit to the client
requirement. We deploy 'clever creatives' and 'disruptors' who are committed to
their work, not to career advancement, to challenge and question the
unquestionable. We exploit our combined business, public sector and research
experience and insights to anticipate needs and to propose simple, practical
solutions to improve the moral, conceptual and physical components of business
competitive advantage and organizational effectiveness. Our services deliver
real value. We collaborate, research, question and challenge to co-create and
embed scalable, durable and adaptable consultancy and applied learning
solutions. We fuse live challenges —transformation and change, business
continuity, innovation, market disruption— with leadership and strategy
execution capability development. We don’t do the transformation to you; we help
you to make the transformation yourself and develop your internal expertise to
ensure that initiatives are holistic, embedded and sustainable. We support
participants and their line leaders in making 'new ways', the 'new norm' by
exploiting 'exposure and experience' and not by relying on programmes of
'education and training'. Where are we based? We are based in the Reading, UK
area; with associates around the UK, Australasia, Asia, USA and Europe. We have
delivered large scale initiatives ultimately reaching 2,500 participating
leaders with teams delivering services concurrently in Asia, USA and UK. These
teams have comprised mobile subject matter experts, local associate consultants,
coaches and actors, and trained client internal consulting and L&D personnel.
