Ignite Lab

Our work in innovation and change brings us in touch with teams from a variety of organisations – cosmetics manufacturers to local councils to insurance firms. We might be helping them through a restructure, or refreshing their strategy, or designing a new product or service – but one thing they all have in common is this: the most important person guiding the decisions they need to make is their customer.

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Would you expect a story about the poor customer service of a small cab firm to make the third page of a national newspaper? I certainly wouldn’t. That’s why I was surprised to find exactly that in the evening standard the other day. Read on →

If I were to say, ‘think about costs like salami’ you might think I’d lost the plot. In fact ‘the salami metaphor’ is just one of the many ways to think about cost cutting. Metaphors as insights are clearly vital, but it would be wise to exercise caution; they don’t always do justice to what we mean. Read on →

Imagine you are a senior operational manager.  It’s six months or a year since you cut over to a new system, and the executive team is asking for an update on the business case – how’s it going with the faster / bigger / better targets that were set?

You’re tempted to pick up the phone to the IT team, but they formally handed the system over to you several months ago, and they’re all now busy off-shoring their applications and trying to get the company to standardise on a single platform for mobile computing.

It’s all down to you – and the lunatics in the asylum.

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The Canadian government is paying public servants to come up with good cost saving ideas.  Is this the right strategy? Does it work? Is it a sustainable way of operating, or maybe a useful ‘one-off’ during challenging times?

A great facilitation team opens a space for other people to think productively. Ignite achieves this by:

• Getting clarity up front about the real issue or opportunity that needs to be addressed
• Encouraging our clients to ensure diversity in the invitation and selection of participants. We understand how important it is to get the right people in the room to begin with
• Optimising the event logistics, ensuring that the selected venue is an enabler for productive thinking and that there is the right balance between activities   Read on →

Isn’t it amazing how adversity brings out the very best in humanity? I have recently been inspired by Patrick the Optimist http://patricktheoptimist.org/ . Patrick has Motor Neurone Disease and is successfully persuading me and thousands of others to do something optimistic every day. So often we hear fantastic stories of people overcoming adversity to do super human things.

Inspiration is not confined to human interest stories. Today’s business challenges will be a platform for new pioneers rising up to the challenges of business adversity. Whole swathes of national industries, even Governments, have rapidly taken up arms to distil solutions and find silver bullets for big, ugly challenges. The mere mention of “Sustainability”, “More for Less” or “Managing through the downturn” quickly evokes a Pavlov’s dog reaction – business leaders salivating at the thought of conquering huge issues – the bells are a-ringing.

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Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs model (pictured) is taught on most business and psychology courses as being an approach to help assess an individual’s motivation levels. Interestingly, this TED video takes it a step further suggesting that the hierarchy is just as applicable to a team, organisation, market and even a country as it is to oneself in our approach to life.

The appeal for me lies in the model’s application when considering the engagement and inspiration of client-side teams – especially when embarking on projects to deliver radical changes in the face of immense budget pressures.

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There is some horror, and not a little cynicism, surrounding the announcement that central government departments are being asked to look for 40% savings.   “They’re softening us up”, the media cry – but perhaps there’s more creativity in this method than might first appear.   Experience tells us that the more you can stretch people’s thinking, the more achievable the unimaginable becomes.

The political and public sector context makes this kind of thinking uncomfortable for many of us.  So how about a few less contentious examples – what if:

• …Martin Luther King hadn’t spoken about his dream that inspired the civil rights movement in the 1960s?
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I’m a late convert to the world of Twitter, but now I’ve woken up to the beauty of alerts to my mobile of news stories, opinions and research.  It’s making a huge difference to the way I work.  I have to admit, I’ve been sceptical for a while and I wasn’t at all engaged in the debates about using Twitter and Facebook at work.  Why would anyone need Facebook at work, I thought.  And besides, we hear all those scare stories about sharing dodgy data (and the risks of exposing different aspects of or lives to the ‘wrong’ audience).  But now I’m perplexed about why businesses wouldn’t want to promote use of social media, not ban it…

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