Stories that make the invisible visible.

Slow Cooking / Work design

A software group had spent ten years growing quickly: new countries, new partners, a series of acquisitions. Every one brought better technology, clients and expertise into the building.

It also brought something nobody had designed. Each acquisition arrived with its own culture and its own way of working. The company thought of itself as highly collaborative. It was also, quietly, highly competitive with itself.

“There is no shared vision.”

Sales ran on individual quotas. The largest and most complex clients were covered by several salespeople calling on different divisions, without knowing about each other. Product management and development were turned inward and rarely saw a client at all.

“I have my own quotas to hit. I can't afford to spend time helping other people hit theirs.”

The trust was there. The goodwill was there. What was missing was a system that made collaborating rational, and objectives that were shared rather than divided.

What we found

1. The board. Fourteen executives who were not aligned, and fourteen organizations underneath reproducing exactly that.
2. The interface between sales and product. High interdependence, low connection.
3. The client journey. It was assembled by whichever division got there first.
4. The incentives. Collaboration was requested and individual results rewarded. Where those disagree, the reward wins.

What the diagnosis gave them

A map of how the company actually worked, next to the one on the chart. The internal connections ranked by what strengthening each one would return. A baseline, so that change could be measured rather than claimed.

Our recommendation was to wait for ongoing leadership changes to settle before aligning objectives and incentives. The diagnosis gave the company a map and a baseline for that next step.

Talent was never the problem. What the company was missing was a way for fourteen people to think like one client.

Slow Cooking / Work design

The Planning & Performance team of a large energy company had come through a long reorganization, and it showed: people were tired. The manager's diagnosis was reasonable. Trust and morale had taken the hit.

But the real friction was at the boundary. Every business unit sent information in a different shape, at a different time and in a different level of detail. The team chased, reworked inputs and stayed late to absorb the difference.

The overload was real. It just was not being generated inside the team.

The ambition that came out of it

Planning & Performance should not be the place where reports are assembled. It should be the integrated intelligence hub of the organization, with transversal collaboration, clear data governance and predictive capability.

What changed

The team came out with a shared reading of its collaborative profiles, named bottlenecks, a shared vision and a roadmap. Its internal network became strong enough that collaboration no longer had to route through the manager.

The intervention made the team more autonomous, cohesive and able to hold its own position in the organization.