Minerva Consulting Services

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.