Projects
Embed a culture of collaboration and innovation
– for today and tomorrow
A proven approach, tools and programs to
drive performance, innovation and growth
Tackling Complex Challenges
Open strategy development is key to adapting and planning for complex challenges.
Innovation Strategy
Develop an innovation strategy including better alignment of resources and an agreed action plan.
Strategic Mindset
Strategic thinking is a core competency for leaders. Learn tools and techniques to help your team to adopt a more strategic approach.
Team Health Check
Review and develop a collaboration or innovation strategy for your team
Custom and Technical Solutions
Tools and techniques to deliver change projects across all levels of innovation maturity.
Hargraves Coaching
A fully customised program to help leaders and their teams solve complex challenges.
Employee Recognition
Capturing and sharing employee stories to boost confidence, improve culture and employee engagement and promote your organisation as a great place to work.
“When you build innovation into the DNA of the company it lasts.
It just becomes part of what you do.”
Understand complex challenges and co-create maps for effective action
Open strategy development is key to adapting and planning for complex challenges.
Today, storytelling and sensemaking are widely used research methods for innovation and design thinking. They allow you to delve and reveal unarticulated needs, wants and truths ― to make sense of complexity. It is part of our approach and used as a precursor to more formal analysis.
Conducting one-on-one interviews with key stakeholders enables us to understand and capture the stories of what’s working well and what’s not working. These insights provide a platform for analysis, allowing your organisation to review its approach to innovation and collaboration.
Then, using these stories and qualitative data, we can build an analysis of why, where and how innovation is happening. Through a facilitated workshop with relevant leaders/stakeholders, we’ll present the analysis and use various methods to identify the main issues to be solved and strategies for success.
This program incorporates open strategy, capturing stories, sensemaking, perception mapping, and action planning to develop a series of challenge briefs.
Delivery:
Interviews may be carried out in person, online or over the phone.
The facilitated workshop may be delivered online, though where possible, we generally recommend taking the opportunity to bring the team together.
Optional:
Celebrate your people and their strengths. Having captured the stories of innovation, we can assess them against our Hargraves Innovator Awards criteria. The process of formally recognising the people making innovation happen boosts your culture and promotes your organisation as a great place to work.
Innovation Strategy – Review and Renewal
Too often, leaders and decision-makers responsible for delivering growth and transformation find they’re not on the same page. Conflicting priorities impact culture as teams work in silos, not together.
The Hargraves Innovation Health Check is a comprehensive review of your innovation goals, objectives, principles, barriers and priorities. Working across four core values for enabling high performance (people, process, ideas and collaboration), the outcome is the better alignment of resources and an agreed action plan with buy-in from leaders across the department/organisation.
In this workshop, individuals with the authority and budget to drive change will work through the three stages of the assessment:
- Understand your current situation using Innovation Principles and Maturity.
- Develop and implement People Centred Innovation with measures.
- Identify areas and actions to renew and achieve your goals.
Outcomes:
- An understanding of the latest research, skills and techniques.
- A comprehensive action plan and clear direction for the department/organisation.
- Access to downloadable tools to support delivery.
Includes a confidential coaching conversation prior to the workshop to discuss key objectives and steer the agenda.
We recommend 6 to 10 Corporate Leaders and Decision Makers with the budget and authority to drive change. 3-hour workshop format; in-person or online.
Optional: A complimentary post-workshop coaching conversation to explore the next steps.
Optional: May be incorporated under the Hargraves Coaching program.
Strategic Mindset (for new and emerging leaders)
Tools and Techniques to Create Long-Term Strategies
Today, strategic thinking is a core competency for leaders and managers in all sectors. By developing strategic thinking abilities, leaders can encourage their teams to adopt more strategic approaches. But the challenge is finding time in the day-to-day to distance yourself and reflect on the bigger picture to envision a future for your team or organisation.
And for new and emerging leaders, transitioning from an operational role to a strategic role requires a new skill set.
In this program, we draw on the work of Christian Stadler’s Open Strategy to explore open thinking to involve employees, customers, experts and competitors.
In this highly interactive program, participants learn how to apply tools and techniques to challenges, solve problems and create long-term strategies.
Learn how to:
- Define strategic thinking and the characteristics of a strategic mindset.
- Apply tools to get insights from the external environment, the internal environment, customers and competitors.
- Apply techniques to think differently through questions, frames and lenses.
- Generate new solutions which can be implemented.
Demonstrate a strategic mindset in day-to-day work.
Ideal for:
- New and emerging leaders
- Team leaders commencing strategic planning and innovation.
- Individuals who have become team leaders and seek the skills to confidently lead their past teammates.
Delivery:
This program includes 4 modules. These may be delivered online (4 x 1.5 hour sessions) or in-person (1 day workshop).
With an additional online post-program session to support practical application in the workplace.
Team Health Check
How do leaders and team leaders continually adapt and update their plans as the world changes around them?
As a leader, are you constantly under pressure? Management expectations to maintain productivity and growth, time frames and tight budgets. Team expectations to lead from the front with a clear purpose and strategy.
With the emergence of hybrid working, your team’s purpose and ‘why’ are more important than ever. And while you know taking time to plan and review is essential, identifying what needs to change – and how to make that change happen – is often put into the “too hard” basket.
The Team Health Check is an opportunity to ask: “How well are we doing, and how can we do better?” And how well is your team adopting collaborative and innovative behaviours to make this possible?
A Hargraves Health Check is a conversation-style assessment. Using our successful format, tools and techniques, it’s an in-depth conversation to take the pain out of the process.
- Understand what’s changing – and what needs to change.
- Explore the blockers – what’s holding you back and why.
- Plan and prioritise next steps – objectives, actions and key priorities.
Outcomes:
- A clear action plan which you can deliver in your timeframe.
- Access to downloadable tools to support delivery.
For an innovation focus, select an Innovation Strategy Health Check, including our innovation principles, building blocks and priority areas.
For a collaboration focus, select a Collaboration Health Check, including our collaboration principles and Collaboration Canvas and diagnostics to assess team collaborative behaviours.
We recommend 1 to 3 Leaders or Team Leaders. 2-hour, conversation style format; in-person or online.
Optional: Follow-up with a full team workshop to align team members with outcomes and explore tools and training to kick-start action.
Custom and Technical Solutions
Sometimes, you need something highly specialised or technical to address a complex challenge. With our comprehensive experience facilitating projects across diverse sectors and industries, we can discuss your needs and provide a confidential proposal.
123 Innovate is a simple innovation process that links people and their capabilities with innovation theory. The result is a flexible process and suite of tools to help organisations create new products and services, build more efficient and effective processes and develop more sustainable business models and new ventures.
Through a 1/2 day in-house workshop, participants learn how to implement this process across the organisation.
Positioned to accelerate continuous improvement processes and develop a climate where innovation becomes everyone’s responsibility, 123 Innovate complements any existing continuous improvement, Six Sigma and LEAN manufacturing initiatives.
Allan Ryan developed 123 Innovate in consultation with Dr Peter Bryant.
STEP the Assets™ brings our expertise and the talent and industry-specific skills of your organisation together to deliver breakthrough solutions to deep-seated internal issues related to technology, production and manufacturing. Projects last 30 to 90 days, covering the full cycle of work beginning with Problem Definition, Theoretical and Practical Solutions and, finally, delivery.
Each phase has specific outcomes defined in advance and may draw on a variety of proven methods, tools and frameworks to help you understand, create, innovate, and solve tough problems in a fraction of the time.
Uniquely designed around your people and organisational needs, X-Teams uses a fundamentally different approach to talent development. By combining people and organisational development and change, X-Teams delivers a program of engaging activities for future leaders in complex organisations.
Designed by Michael Schrage of MIT and Allan Ryan, X-Teams delivers a hands-on, practical experience creating new ideas that easily align with your goals.
X-Teams is customised and integrated with individual, organisational or department objectives, goals and internal programs, ensuring minimal disruption and maximum contribution from all stakeholders, including program sponsor, relevant executive leaders and participant sponsors, and participants themselves – generally high performers, senior executives and managers.
Typically, X-Teams projects are ‘hothouse’ environments that test the participants with real issues and presentation of ideas to executive leaders as part of the normal course of business initiatives.
Tools and techniques to deliver change projects across all levels of innovation maturity
Make It Better
Make It Different
Hargraves Innovation Capability Maturity Levels 1 & 2
- Perception Mapping
- Trend Mapping
- Speed Blitz/Random Words for Brainstorming
- Pitch
- Business Model Canvas
- Journey/ Customer experience mapping
- Step the Assets Process
Make It Different
Sell Different
Hargraves Innovation Capability Maturity Levels 2 & 3
- Tangible/Intangible reasons for purchase
- X Teams
- Appreciative Enquiry – Effective Outcomes
- Voice of the Customer
- Trends & Big Data analytics
Sell Different, Work Different
Live Different
Hargraves Innovation Capability Maturity Levels 3, 4 & 5
- Patent Mapping – White spaces
- Co-Designing as a Strategy
- Using Outside Communities