DiscoverY
This is the Daring Way™ practice of surfacing insights, to support the design of effective strategy, as we strive to answer the 3 fundamental questions of joyful and impactful collaboration:
- What should we do next?
- How should we do it?
- How should we be together?
If this is of interest, please read on.
The Principle and Practice of Discovery
The profitable execution of the Discover, Deliver, Delight™ practices is a highly collaborative venture, often in need of coaching support. It is this collaboration coaching that benefits our clients – the difference that makes the difference.
The following Discovery plays have been carefully designed or chosen to support the work done both in this practice, as well as the others. As we partner with our clients, our work weaves these 3 core practices together, creating your own playbook and your Daring Way™.
This then, is how we realise your ambitions.
“According to Darwin’s Origin of Species, it is not the most intellectual of the species that survives; it is not the strongest that survives; but the species that survives is the one that is able best to adapt and adjust to the changing environment in which it finds itself.”
Plays for the Discovery Practice
The following Discovery plays have been carefully designed or chosen to support the work done both in this practice, as well as the others. As we partner with our clients, our work weaves these 3 core practices together, creating your own playbook and your Daring Way™.
Vision Canvas (Daring Visions)
We designed our Daring Visions[1] canvas to support structured conversations regarding both the destination of a venture (the vision), and how it is to be brought about (the values and mission). Can be used with individuals, teams, and teams of teams (organisation).
Benefits include:
- Clarity and Alignment - facilitates a shared understanding of key components of a change project
- Accountability and Ownership - creates a shared understanding of the critical success factors
- Psychological Safety - generates the deep trust essential to impactful collaboration.
Market Opportunity Navigator
The Market Opportunity Navigator[2] provides a wide-lens perspective to find different potential market domains for your innovation, before you zoom in and design the business model or test your minimal viable products. This framework can act as the front-end of Customer Development.
Benefits include:
- Precision - It helps figure out the most promising starting position – market domain – for your customer development process.
- Navigation Aid - Identify promising alternative Plan B’s and new growth options if you have already embarked on your innovation journey.
Value Proposition Canvas
The Value Proposition Canvas[3] is a highly effective tool for aligning products with customer needs.
Benefits include:
- Customer Insight - Identify the customer’s jobs, along with the pains they experience doing those jobs, and gains they’re looking to achieve by doing them.
- Visualise Value - Define the product components in terms of customer needs, to give full traceability.
- Product-Market Fit - Allows nuanced adjustments to be made, and documented, during the product life-cycle.
Business Model Canvas
The Business Model Canvas[4] is a global standard to describe, challenge, and pivot the organisation’s existing business model, as well as prototype new ones.
Benefits include:
- Organisation Alignment - Provides a common framework for use within an organisation to clarify major components within the business operation, to align the team around these.
- Test Opportunities - Allows leaders to prototype responses to market opportunities, to identify major components of change.
Operating Model Canvas
The Operating Model Canvas[5] is an excellent accompaniment to the Business Model Canvas work, and both informs strategy as well as supporting its translation into execution.
Benefits include:
- Transformation Guidance - Provides a shared understanding as to how to optimise an organisation for digitising and operating services.
- Flexible Deployment - Supports the development of talent, and ensures sufficient authorities are delegated to where the key decisions need to be made.
Simulations
We also offer a range of services designed to simulate a variety of organisational and operating dynamics. These simulations allow individuals and teams to go beyond concepts and theory, in deepening their learning, by test-driving collaborative practices.
- Playing Lean[6] - A flight simulator for innovation and Lean Startup. It's an enjoyable board game where players are forced to make difficult choices without risking their life savings or the future of their workplaces.
- GetKanban[7] - A physical game designed to teach the concepts and mechanics of Kanban for software development in a class or workshop setting.
- FlowLab[8] - A set of board play business simulations that let you experience flow at different levels of the enterprise.
- Prelude[9] - Acts as a catalyst towards developing trust, which ultimately leads towards significant increases in team performance. A safe place for the team to tune-up before any major performance.
- LEGO Serious Play[10] - A technique which improves group problem solving by utilizing visual, auditory and kinesthetic skills. The Method serves as a shared language regardless of culture or position.
ValueMatch Profile
ValueMatch[11] offers online assessment tools and accompanying services based on the ideas of Spiral Dynamics and Reinventing Organizations. Where other tests and research are based on behaviour, these instruments measure underlying value systems. This enables us to uncover the dynamics between people and their workplace and so empower employees, teams and organizations to function better. The profiles can be used in the contexts of working with an individual, team or organisational unit.
Benefits include:
- Culture Assessment - Provides insight into the dynamics between individuals and organisations, which is particularly useful when operating across geographic and cultural boundaries, or following merger or acquisition.
- Values Alignment - Facilitates an awareness of, and attunement to, different value systems, thereby setting the stage for more harmonious collaborations.
- Change Readiness - Indicates the current energetic state of being across 5 change states, which provides indicators to the type of intervention most likely to succeed for the given change.
Personal Insight
Finally, we offer a range of services designed to discover personal insights, either for personal development, or combining in collaborative team-based development. Each of these tools allow individuals and teams to explore a variety of aspects of themselves, in safety, so that they may bring more of themselves to what they do.
- IKIGAI[12] - Ikigai is a Japanese concept that means “a reason for being”. We coach this process with individuals in search of greater purpose in their work, and with teams as part of a forming process.
- 360-degree feedback & review[13] - We offer this service as part of a personal development plan (PDP), typically at the start and end of an intervention.
- Moving Motivators[14] - An exploration into 10 intrinsic motivators, which can be insightful for understanding how individuals and teams make decisions. Knowing what motivates us, and learning to work with that, is like a carpenter knowing how to work with the grain of the wood.
- Gallup Strengths[15] - Based on strengths psychology, this service makes explicit the talent that lies within an individual, as well as the ingredients that make up a team. This knowledge can support the design of effective teams, as well as identify potential areas that might impede collaboration.
- Gallup BP10 profile[16] - Designed for entrepreneurs, executives and product teams, this service identifies innate talents for starting and growing something of economic value. Again, these insights can be used to design effective teams, as well as personalised development.
- Personality Assessment[17] - Based on the Big 5 aspects scale, this service helps you determine what jobs suit you and why, what sort of people you are likely to find compatible (and incompatible), where your strengths and weaknesses lie and, perhaps most importantly, just how profound the differences between individuals actually are.
But don't just take our word for it...
One Of The Finest.
A mutual colleague introduced Andrew to our management team a year ago. At the time we were about to start a visioning exercise.Our product, Prelude, had pivoted from Education K20 to B2B training and from a traditional blended learning tool to an online resource for virtual teams.
Over the ensuing several months, Andrew guided our team through a dynamic, rigorous process of review, inquiry, and analysis.
His global perspective and deep insights were invaluable. Ultimately, Andrew enabled us to transform our thinking about realising Prelude’s full potential to deliver optimal value for our partners and clients.
The positive results are already started to show. Andrew is not just one of the smartest most industrious people we’ve met, he is also one of the finest. His warmth, humour, and generosity of spirit enlivened every one of our virtual meetings throughout. We wholeheartedly believe that anyone who has the opportunity to work with Andrew is fortunate indeed.
Trusted Advisor.
Andrew understands the value of education, coaching and behavioural change when it comes to improving organisational agility.There is no person I would trust more than Andrew in this regard.
He focuses on the long-term needs, making education valuable to the organisation rather than just a worthless label.
Andrew has an excellent career ahead of him, and if you have the opportunity to employ him, then I have no hesitation in recommending Andrew.
C-Suite CoachING.
I have had the pleasure of working with Andrew over the last year on a large scale financial services business agility transformation.Andrew is an excellent C-level coach with a particular focus and skill set around culture and leadership, which is a huge asset when working with senior leaders.
I wholeheartedly recommend Andrew and look forward to working with him again in the future.
Open And Honest.
Andrew is one of the most well read and well connected coaches I have ever met.The sheer breadth of his knowledge and his deep understanding of a variety of business and culture change models and techniques combined with his strong ethics enables him to succeed in many different environments.
Andrew's approach is very customer orientated his coaching style enables people to grow their skills and abilities quickly and seamlessly.
Andrew is open and honest, always prepared to help and never afraid to challenge the status quo in a constructive manner.
We are miles from where we started thanks to Andrew.
Can't wait to work with him again!
Outstanding Coaching Skills.
I cannot recommend Andrew highly enough, words will not truly reflect how knowledgeable and how much of an outstanding coach he is.The explanations of difficult topics were described without fail in a way that really allowed you to understand. Andrew always ensures that your learning is depend with examples you can relate to.
This is not just accomplished by his outstanding coaching skills and ability to understand each individual, it also comes from his genuine interest in your life allowing you to visualise relevant examples reflective of your own learning.
I met Andrew as coach who I hoped to learn from, now 3 months down the line with my agile knowledge exceeded beyond my imagination I leave with better outlook on life and the working world all because of who I would now deem a friend as well as the most knowledgeable guy I have ever met.
A Visionary And A Shaper.
Andrew is the one of the most well read and insightful culture & leadership agility transformation advisories I know.Andrew pointed me towards Trust Quotient, Spiral Dynamics Integral, the Theory of Everything, and Extreme Ownership. Andy helped me to hone my skills with non-violent communication, Organisational Change Assessment Instrument (OCAI), and ADKAR.
Strategic Thinker And Passionate Doer.
I have had the pleasure of working with Andrew a couple of times as a colleague and ongoing as a business coach.Andrew's passion and advocacy for agile practices is contagious, his open, pragmatic and honest approach and his people skills develop a real 'can do' attitude within the teams he works with; expertise and his own personal investment in learning brings leading and even bleeding edge thinking to the table and makes him an incredibly valuable advisor, coach and mentor.
He fits easily into the role of strategic thinker or passionate doer and is respected by his colleagues and clients alike!
Well-Read And Thoughtful.
Andrew has lots of well-deserved and articulate recommendations. It goes without saying he's a fab transformation coach.He is indeed incredibly well-read and thoughtful coach. I liked another aspect of Andrew’s work, that's was the ability to provide folks entirely new to Agile short snappy upbeat training sessions - topics that might seem dull to other loftier coaches were brought alive in an accessible, meaningful and engaging manner.
Andrew can adapt his style to make novices feel new ways of working are for them. Someone mentioned ethics? Andy cuts out the nonsense we face daily and gets to the nub of what makes working life sweeter - positive relationships. I had a blast Andrew.
Great job!
Highly Collaborative.
His enthusiasm and highly collaborative style enabled us to build a high performing team in what was a very chaotic and dispersed programme.He has very strong coaching skills and can build effective working relationships and add value to both teams and individuals very quickly.
As a consultant he brings a wealth of knowledge to the role and can apply this very effectively to solve the problems that his clients present him with.
I would not hesitate to bring Andrew into future programmes should the opportunity present itself.
Andrew delivered real value in three particular areas, those being Agile facilitation with elaboration teams, Coaching activity with the senior programme team, and delivering a Kanban solution for the Dependent Systems team.
Extensive Experience.
I have worked with Andrew for the last 18 months on a flagship government project utilising Agile development methodologies.I came to the project with no background in Agile delivery and with extensive experience of successful delivery using waterfall based methodologies. Andrew tutored me in the various approaches to Agile development and backed this learning up with his own actions, Andrew lives and breathes Agile.
Andrew can couple his Agile theories with extensive experience in software development and this has allowed him to support me in a difficult role (Solution Architect) by providing practical examples of how an Agile delivery can still provide the base Architecture and deliver value early.
As well as the practical aspects of Agile, Andrew has coached me in the softer skills required to be an effective Agile practitioner, providing an overview of techniques for decision making, problem solving and conflict resolution, providing an environment in which I could practice those skills safely and then supporting me as I used them in the delivery of my projects.
Andrew has facilitated my transformation from Agile Cynic to Agile champion by being an amazing coach. I now feel confident in adopting Agile for any future project that I am involved in as either a leader or a consultant.
Natural Coaching Approach.
Clarifying your direction and goals in business is not always easy.Through powerful questions Andrew helped me to explore and identify what I wanted to achieve and have the courage to create strategies to enable me to realise them.
Andrew has a natural sense of curiosity and a manner which quickly puts you at your ease.
He is very knowledgeable combining a commercial focus with a natural coaching approach which allows him to get the most out of people.
I would highly recommend Andrew and look forward to working with him again in the future.