Culture & Strategy

Through dialogue, analysis, facilitation, coaching and mentoring we can help you with…

• Culture & Values development

• Strategic engineering and planning

• Change management and leadership

• Paradox & tensions management

• Project development

• Negotiation preparation

• Group facilitation

• Team development

Culture and Values Development

The challenges with culture and values are (a) understanding what they mean and (b) translating them into the real world… so that they can be ’embodied’ and lived. In addition, changes to working practice (e.g. working form home/hybrid) can have a ‘fracturing’ effect on the culture of individual teams as well as the organisation as a whole.

Our approach to ‘Culture and Values Enhancement’ is to help you and your organisation understand and (where necessary) redefine the culture whilst ‘realising’ the values by making them truly meaningful.

Strategic Engineering

The Imaginarium ‘Strategic Engineering’ approach takes an overview of how a company ticks, understanding where the cogs may be misaligned or missing altogether. This is designed to identify and resolve ‘communication gaps’ in an organisation.

The following ‘communication gap’ problems can have a dramatic financial cost to the organisation through lost time, lost income and lost opportunities:

• Not delivering or meeting expectations
• Performance issues and apparent lack of capability
• Lack of proactivity, people not stepping up
• Demotivation and inactivity
• Problems remaining unresolved, not moving on, going around in circles
• Tensions and conflict (see Paradox Management below)
• Lack of development and learning
• Senior management/CEO having to fill skills gap and doing what should be done by others
• Increased staff turnover
• Inappropriate behaviour
• Higher stress levels
• Tasks and deadlines being missed / not getting done

Through Strategic Engineering, we can help you to step back and take a bigger picture perspective of the organisational ‘machine’ as a whole. We will then work with you to provide practical solutions AND methods of gaining staff engagement.

The Imaginarium Strategic Engineering approach will benefit CEOs and Senior Management by freeing-up time for leading, doing what matters, focusing on the big picture and driving the business forward. Staff will also benefit by increased motivation and satisfaction, unobstructed performance (i.e. the ability to get on with job at hand) and greater wellbeing/reduced stress levels.

Change Management and Leadership

Imaginarium offers support to organisations that are going through change or merging companies/departments.

When organisations transition or amalgamate, this can introduce a series of challenges from a leadership perspective. For example:

• Colliding cultures that become fractured instead of united.
• Split identities – staff still identifying as the old company.
• Continual reference to the past and old times.
• Confused values.
• Resistance to change.
• Demotivation.
• Managers not prepared to deal with the people challenges.

How can we help?

As people experts, we can support your leadership team to:

• Create a positive working culture.
• Focus the organisation towards the future.
• Turn values into active behaviour.
• Integrate teams to help them work together.
• Speed up the process of engagement and ‘on-boarding’.
• Build resilience throughout the organisation.
• Develop leader/manager skills to convert resistance into positive action.

Paradox and Tensions Management

Imaginarium Learning and Development offers a genuinely unique service in Paradox & Tension Management, based on the book “Solving Impossible Problems.”

Unresolved paradoxes and tensions can lead to high level conflict, upset, depression, paralysis, intense stress and wasted money, time and resources. Unresolved paradoxes can also manifest in high staff turnover and companies going out of business. As the rate of work and change accelerates, pressure will grow and expectations will become higher and higher. This means organisations (and the people in the organisations) will be facing more paradoxes more frequently.

Paradox & Tensions Management is the learnt ability to resolve and/or work with the contradictions, conflicts and dilemmas in any given context.

The Imaginarium ‘Paradox Management’ approach provides a toolkit of strategies that can be used at an individual, managerial and organisational level to ‘blow out’ paradoxes and hence remove problems. As well as removing a problem, managed paradoxes can also generate leading edge systems and innovative strategies.

We currently work with Joe Cheal of Imaginarium Learning & Development to help train and strengthen our fantastic team. His ability to engage and harness the collective power of many individuals is helping to bring benefits to our firm and how we can then better serve our clients.

Matthew Tyson
Managing Director
Richard Place Dobson

Joe did a fantastic job facilitating a programme management short and long-term planning away for us. This was especially impressive for us as we booked him at the last minute (less than 5 days). Joe was able to quickly and easily assimilate our plans for the day and in addition, contributed to the development of the activities and we achieved our original outcomes all with ease and minimum stress. We would definitely recommend working with Joe for future team facilitation.

Fiona Hurd
Communication and Engagement Officer
Sussex Sustainability Research Programme (SSRP)

I want to thank you very much for your excellent facilitation of the meeting – which very much contributed to its success.

Prof. Joseph Alcamo
Director, Sussex Sustainability Research Programme (SSRP)
Professor, Environmental Systems Science (School of Global Studies)
University of Sussex, U.K.

There are few in the current marketplace who understands the dynamics of paradox management as well as Joe.

Edward Grey
Director & Principal Coach
BlueTouchPaper Consulting

Joe is a committed and expert development specialist. He is always researching new ground and has a particular and unique understanding of how to manage the paradoxical nature of business.

Nic Brocklebank
Senior Consultant
Lane4