As a fast-growing 400-person company gathered for its quarterly leadership offsite, the founders still remember when the whole team fit in one room. It was back when growth itself felt exciting and no challenge felt too overwhelming.
Now there are functions, layers, and a steady wave of tensions, small and large and they seem to keep everyone in permanent busy and firefighting mode. The offsite is a welcome break from the pace, but nobody expects it to solve anything.
“We’re doing more than ever,” the COO says, “and we’re still missing the numbers.” “Well, the roadmap keeps moving under me,” the Head of Product answers. “Yes, everything does feel harder than it should, and our clients are noticing,” adds the Head of Sales. It’s hard to fully grasp what’s not working but something is.
Another all-hands follows, then a new OKobjectivesR cycle, then a reorg that rearranges the same structural tensions under new names. Three months later, the COO and the Head of Product are back in the same argument, and despite some initial improvements, the picture is the same.
A few weeks later, the leadership team sit around the same table again, this time with a report drawn from structured conversations and surveys across every function, their teams, and selected clients. For the first time, words are put on the underlying mechanisms behind their challenges and tensions, and they now share an understanding of them. That is Discovery.
Over the sessions that follow, the team gains some further insights on ways to address the tensions and they put them immediately in practice: each session ends with a decision and actions on what to change: on setting aligned objectives and ensuring they are followed, on the org structure needed to support those objectives, on shortening the time to value for clients, and importantly, on how to continuously learn about what works, what doesn’t, and act on it. By the last session, the decisions and actions are bound into a Change Playbook, the document, the living, working reference that will drive the change. That is the Leadership Bootcamp.
Six weeks later, the calendar is full again, the enthusiasm fades again and the new ways of working seems like the easiest thing to let go of. This time, someone is still in the room with the leadership team: a coach for the leaders carrying the change, a facilitator keeping the leadership team energized and working on the objectives they define, or, when nobody inside the organisation has the bandwidth, a Change Delivery Leader embedded in the team to see it through. That is Change Delivery.
Discovery, the Leadership Bootcamp and Change Delivery are the three INCEPTI services forming one arc, built for leadership teams who need new perspectives and tools on growing, scaling and adapting their organisation.
See it all brought together, from our Four Lenses, to our Founders to our Services: INCEPTI-on-a-page.
