The Sense and Adapt Academy provides consulting, education and transformation to create high-performance change teams, customer-driven businesses and adaptive organisation designs.
Business Transformation and Education Services.
Stephen Parry
Stephen is the founder and senior partner at the Sense and Adapt Academy: Creating Lean and Agility enterprises through long-term high performing change teams, customer centricity, leading to profitability, differentiation and superior work-climates.
Multi-award winning transformation leader, strategist, and author of Sense and Respond: The Journey to Customer Purpose. Stephen Parry has an outstanding global reputation for organizational transformation and building customer and employee centric businesses.
Stephen is recognised as world-class expert in creating strategic differentiation for medium to global organizations, including change program design, competitive and operational strategy, Sense-and-Adapt business models, lean and agility enterprises.
Cited as one of the Top 25 CX influencers of 2019/2020 by the Customer Experience Magazine. With over 20 years of business design and transformation experience including pioneering the application of Lean and Agile to Service Operations especially to large Scale IT infrastructure business and outsourcing.
We help organisations become highly adaptive to the market by engaging the willing contribution of staff, managers and leaders.
The speed of business change today is phenomenal. Yet, the way businesses have designed organisational structures and trained people to work in them is still entrenched in 19th and 20th-century thinking, and they don’t meet current challenges.
Our research has shown that many senior managers are frustrated with the fact that they seem to be re-organising their businesses continually, perhaps once or more every two years because of new technology, new business models, mergers, regulation and, more frequently, the latest management transformation silver bullet. The list can seem endless.
The most chronic business challenge for many organisations is their ability to change rapidly and continually align strategies, structures, governance, culture and delivery capabilities.
Given these circumstances, many managers are seeking new forms of adaptive organisational designs that are by nature continually changing in response to internal and external pressures, where structures and people adapt with little or no fear of different business situations.
Organisations seeking a transformation from the old world to the new need to discover how to respond to following the challenges:
How to define a business strategy that has the flexibility to adjust to changing markets and competitive disruption.
How to create business designs that adjust continually without incurring the massive overheads of constant reorganisations.
How to create management systems that allow management and staff at all levels to explore new niches and exploit competitive weaknesses to create differentiation and long-term profitability, while engaging the willing contribution of staff and managers.
You can't control market evolution, but you can control your own.
Adaptiveness is the art of integrating bold visions and harsh realities.
Adaptability Defined
An adaptive organisation is ‘chameleon like’ in its ability to keep pace with changes in its surroundings. However, unlike the chameleon, it not only needs to respond to the environment but to go further and disrupt the environment to create competitive advantage. A key enabler for organisational adaptability is designing the organisational structures and governance systems to create a culture that devolves decision-making much lower down in the organisation. This, along with autonomy, resourcefulness and freedom to explore new ways of working can create an adaptive work-climate. Put simply, adaptive organisations develop staff and managers to seek out and remove organisational constraints, systematically removing obstacles that impede the ingenuity and learning of teams and the flow of continuous value to customers. Adaptability requires much higher levels of collaboration and necessitates a new relationship between managers and staff.
Adaptability is the context of Sense and Adapt businesses and focuses on the ability of the broader workforce to continually adapt and change their job roles, processes, measurement systems, reward systems and structures to create new organisational and operational capabilities, while developing and delivering new forms of value for customers.
Business Transformation Services and Education Services
Below you will see our Sense and Adapt Business System for creating Adaptive Businesses and Cultures. A wide range of education modules to support our transformation programs and create internal transformation skills and experience for your change communities and managers.
Adaptive Business Dynamics
Engaging and understanding customers Organisations have methods and approaches to engage with customers, understand and quantify their needs, while measuring their own organisation’s end-to-end ability to satisfy customers.
Learning and sharing customer and business intelligence Organisations have methods and approaches to enable the sharing and understanding of customer and external market information horizontally between departments and vertically between staff, managers and leaders.
Leading and choosing new ways to serve customers Organisations have methods and approaches to enable them to identify areas in need of change and develop new possibilities and choices to serve customers and markets better than their competition.
Improving and adapting the organisation to better serve customers Organisations have methods to enable people to improve, innovate and change day-to-day work activities to better serve customers.
Work-Climate Diagnostic Climetrics®
The work-climate is the combined perceptions, feelings, and behaviours of staff, managers, and leaders.
Extensive research has proven a link between the climate and overall operational performance of an organisation, and this connection demonstrates that the environment is a predictor of sustainable financial success. As a result, the Climetrics® organisational diagnostic has been developed to identify how management activities, measurement systems, structures, and delivery capabilities combine to create a business that leads to high performance and long-term profitability. It determines the current state of the business and provides an overall Adaptability rating.
Re-purposing for Adaptability
The cycle for moving the organisation towards and achieving an Adaptive Organisation and Culture is explained using four developmental stages aimed at specific roles within the company:
Adaptive Business Design – The Change Architect
In this step, the change architects develop methods and approaches to design change initiatives in response to business and market pressures. They determine the scale and complexity depending on the nature of the business change and organisational developmental requirements.
Adaptive Business Engagement – The Change Maker
The change makers create methods, systems and practices to enable their organisation to develop internal change capability, utilising leadership, coaching and mentoring, change management, and influencing and planning skills.
Adaptive Business Adoption – The Change Agent
Change agents enable traditional coaching communities to coach and mentor the adoption and integration of Adaptive methods into everyday work. This allows for the development of end-to-end collaboration, critical thinking, problem-solving and improvement activities at all levels of the organisation.
Adapting the Business Continually – The Manager
The managers provide skills, knowledge and behaviours to manage an Adaptive business to sustain and enhance business-delivery capabilities, while engaging the willing contribution of staff. Managers with responsibilities for ensuring continuous value flows to customers will need specific knowledge to manage horizontally end-to-end and vertically top-to-bottom.
Managers building and improving delivery capabilities will learn how to manage in an organic adaptive way. Managers involved in operating strategies and structures will learn how to co-ordinate and leverage an adaptive business and work-climate.
Finally, managers’ competitive strategy will need to take advantage of their businesses’ adaptability to go to market faster with differentiated products and services.
Education Modules
Each of the developmental stages (Design, Engage, Adopt and Adapt) has been broken down into course modules (see below), which enables organisations to acquire sufficient knowledge, master practices and demonstrate behaviours to initiate and sustain the journey to a fully mature, Adaptive organisation and work-climate. Each module builds upon the previous modules starting with essentials and progressing where appropriate to advanced, professional and masterclass.
Please note, the courses are structured around the activities being performed, for example building delivery capability and only approximated to a typical management or staff functions. If those job functions are different in your company simply seek out the activity and the level of complexity and ignore the job function, the courses will have the same content.
These modules are designed to accompany our consulting and change programs. However, short courses can be created to suit a particular need. Please contact us to discuss.
Design
Change Architect Masterclass
Collective learning and collaboration are key to addressing serious business challenges.
Level: Masterclass – for Mid Managers
Big-picture collaboration addresses new and emerging business needs and enables you to continually recalibrate direction and execution in response to emerging business threats and opportunities.
Change Architect Professional
Learn to discover where you are, where you need to be and how to get there.
Level: Professional – For Mid Managers
The focus of this course is learning how to initiate a journey of business self-discovery to determine your business fitness to compete in a changing marketplace and take stock of your ability to change.
Engage
Change Maker Masterclass Course
Engaging the Business in Conversations for Change
Level: Masterclass
Real-world Preparation for Change Makers in the Field
The Masterclass Course builds on the Professional Course, giving delegates an authentic platform on which to apply their newly-acquired professional knowledge base, the aim being to capitalise on momentum by employing the theoretical to the realities of leadership in corporate cultural transformation.
Change Maker Professional Course
Engaging the Business in Conversations for Change
Level: Professional
Elevating Change Process Knowledge in the Change Maker Role
The Change Maker Professional Course provides delegates with the most relevant, advanced and sophisticated methods for creating adaptive businesses available today in order to supercharge their effectiveness as future leaders in cultural transformation.
Adopt
Change Agent Advanced Course
Adopting New Ways of Thinking and Working
Level: Advanced
Next Level Development for Future Change Agents
Building on the Essentials Course, the Change Agent Advanced Course develops the knowledge and skills of motivated future Change Agents to profound and applicable levels.
Change Agent Essentials Course
Adopting New Ways of Thinking and Working
Level: Essentials
Key Foundational Development for Aspiring Change Agents
The Change Agent Essentials Course introduces those wishing to establish themselves as accomplished change practitioners with the prerequisite fundamentals necessary to make it happen. Whether you want to become an impactful change expert within an organisation or an independent professional, this course is where the rubber meets the road.
Adapt
Adaptive Business Manager Masterclass (Strategies)
Developing Competitive and Operational Strategies
Level: Masterclass – for Senior Managers
Adaptive Business is all about creating competitive advantage.
Helping businesses identify competitive advantages and translating them into the overall operating strategies for continuous deployment with grace, ease and pace requires collaboration between operations and the executive to ensure alignment and rapid execution.
Adaptive Business Manager Masterclass (Structures)
Evolving Structures and Governance
Level: Masterclass – for Senior Managers
Understanding how to adjust governance and operational structures to capitalise on innovation and improvement is the focus.
Creating the right governance and organisational structures, while maintaining accountability and responsibility, is key to releasing the inherent inventiveness, collaboration and collective problem-solving abilities of your business. Do it correctly and it will create a productive and engaging workplace for both managers and staff.
Adaptive Business Manager Professional (Capability)
Developing Capability and Capacity
Level: Professional – for Mid Managers
The art of modern management is continually enhancing delivery capability for today’s business and tomorrow’s.
Systematically developing better ways to run today’s business, while preparing for tomorrow’s, requires insight and data to keep your resources and skills optimised and tuned to future demands. Adaptive businesses actively seek to sense the long-range more quickly and deeply, providing time to adapt at a pace that exceeds that of your competition.
Adaptive Business Manager Advanced (Value-Flow)
Refining Value Flows, Standards and Resources
Level: Advanced – for Front-Line Managers
Keep the value flowing without disruption or disconnections key.
Identifying and diagnosing disconnects in the daily flow of value to your customers is a rich source of both improvement information and transformation ideas. Managing disconnects through their identification, correction, measurement and prevention might mean more than a simple process change.
Adaptive Business Manager Essentials
Understanding Adaptive Business Concepts and Cultures
Level: Essentials – All Management Levels
To transform you only need to change the elements that will secure your future while protecting your core business.
This course is for all managers who wish to understand how to start the journey towards creating a highly responsive and adaptive organisation to meet the needs of today, while creating the foundations for tomorrow’s business will learn essential skills.