Capabilities

How do you identify and build the skills your organisation needs to succeed both today and tomorrow?

As organisations transform, they need to build new skills to support their future direction. But skill building is rarely a matter of simply learning something new – it often requires a significant mindset shift and some element of personal change. Indeed, many of the challenging transformational changes organisations need to make today require people to think and act much differently than before.

We do what traditional training companies can’t: we bring together insights into an organisation’s culture and the business changes they need to make, and marry this with a deep understanding of how to motivate people to change.

We help people develop the skills they need to succeed – building leadership capabilities to propel organisations forward.

How is our work in capabilities differentiated?

We start with the human dimension.

We believe that understanding the people you are teaching to and the human interactions at play matters as much as understanding the content. We take time to understand the human and cultural dynamics and build this into our learning design.

We create custom methodologies.

We never come with standard curricula to teach. Instead, we create a learning approach and content tailored exactly to the people and situation at hand. This ensures much greater engagement with learning and more sustained learning outcomes. We draw from literature, psychology, neuroscience and the theatre arts to inform our pedagogical theory.

We ground our solutions in reality.

We do deep research into the organisations and teams we work with and design realistic curricula, often using a scenario-based method to mirror actual situations the learners will encounter. We also offer follow-up support through digital tools and personal coaching, to help people embed their learnings in their daily work.

Read a case study on our work in capabilities

How do you get people to not only understand new ways of working but also build the confidence and belief to embody them?

We created our behaviour-driven approach to capability building nearly 20 years ago, while working with a beverage company that realised it needed to have better visibility and control over its operations and costs. Whilst these sorts of ideas are business orthodoxy nowadays, that wasn’t the case then. The company understood that having a better controlled and cost-efficient business would require its back-office functions to play a more assertive role than they had traditionally.

We worked with the CFO and the Finance function to build the key skills they needed to take the organisation on this journey, such as learning how to hold others to account effectively whilst also preserving relationships. We then extended our training to cover other back-office functions, like IT and Supply Chain. As a result of our work, the company ended up being one of the leaders in lean business operations in its industry and beyond, and it achieved impressive growth compared to its peers.

Results we achieved:

Trained 200+ Finance staff and 100+ other back-office staff globally in a top-rated capability building programme

Enabled a successful $100 million cost and control transformation

Built the next generation of business partnering behaviours that would become increasingly important in a technology-driven world

What were some of the unique contributions we made that led to success?

We started with the human dimension.

Rather than focusing only on what the back-office functions needed to learn to hold the rest of the business to account, we also took a close look at the power dynamics between the different functions in the organisation, and even the personality types. We designed training interventions that took this into account and helped build confidence and belief in the back-office staff, allowing them to take up their new responsibilities with authenticity and energy, and to grow their professional skills.

We created custom methodologies.

We used approaches and methods from literature, psychology and the theatre arts to create a completely bespoke and highly interactive training methodology. We created opportunities for people to practice the new things being asked of them in a safe space, such as challenging more senior or more powerful colleagues in Marketing or Sales.

We grounded our solutions in reality.

We did deep research into the kinds of scenarios and reactions the back-office functions would face when asserting a culture of greater cost control. We built these insights into our training methodology to help people understand not only logically what they now needed to do but also to experience situations they would find themselves in so they could feel and practice the new behaviours and ways of working.

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