My Work!

I started a company called Group Partners on the first of January 2001. So that was 01: 01 01. Cool Huh?

We say this:

Group Partners operates a strategic consulting practice based out of London and delivering globally to large complex enterprises. Our mission is to change the way that businesses and institutions think and work – and at the same time to make sure that we help them solve the right problems.

We work with senior teams across the globe helping them frame their strategy or transformation so that they can deliver sustainable change, either themselves or with their chosen partners and suppliers. At the heart of our philosophy is complete objectivity – we have no personal agenda or solution to sell through our processes. We are happy to work with other providers and experts - at the appropriate time and always when we are very clear, on behalf of our client, about what problem we are trying to solve and when we have a clear definition of success.

Our commitment to you will be to enhance the capabilities of your team and to maximize the outcomes from your program. We can confidently guarantee that this approach will increase the likelihood of success and will result in a significantly more enlightened perspective. Realizing the benefit will require real commitment to this program and persistence.

At the heart of our approach is team working and co-creation through facilitated workshops using high impact visual techniques – however the outcomes of these interventions have to be understood and embraced across the organization for sustainable change. This does not simply mean that we broadcast the intention - co- creation as a principle needs to be a constant throughout, changing current behaviors is an inevitable outcome of this program.

Our approach has been developed from some very strong beliefs and real experiences of trying to solve our own problems. These have resulted in a philosophy that we call Structured Visual Thinking™.

We believe it is nearly impossible to crack complex strategy and change programs where all the thinking is done out of sight by staff people, all the conversations take place in disconnected one-hour meetings and all the communications take place in massive and impenetrable PowerPoint decks (or Word documents). So we invented a distinctly visual way of working.

As the name suggests it combines the need for better thinking with structure and visualization. Our structures are better known as 4DTM - a series of logical frameworks. Our visualization techniques are unique and rich. They involve digital technology, a vast array of business objects and the skills of the animator, the moviemaker and the storyteller.

This involves

• Visualizing critical information and future scenarios - in context - ensuring multiple stakeholder access
• Causing vital conversation - building consensus around logic and structure
• Synthesizing large amounts of content and data within visual interfaces to ensure fast access and application
• Ensuring sharp and effective communication through world class visualization
• Demonstrating how change and transformation may look
• Creating clear and compelling stories about complex and often intangible business ideas
• Making decision quality a standard through logic frameworks
• Building engagement and ownership throughout the enterprise via shared and meaningful artefacts

There are a number of benefits realised through the strong emphasis on visualisation:

1. Common understanding. It is much harder to develop multiple interpretations of an image and much easier to grasp the key points.
2. Removal of complexity and information overload. Attention can focus on the most significant points and the visual can reduce a relatively complex story dramatically
3. Impact. The act of co creating the visual will result in greater focus and attention – and the audience will find it much easier to repeat the ‘story’ to others using the visual as a prompt.
4. Pictures are more inclusive. Pictures have an iconic, emotive quality that helps to keep understanding and consensus alive and healthy.
5. Shared commitment is continuously reinforced because everyone can still see a depiction of what the team collectively thought, where the decided it should lead and why they all agreed to go there together.

Fundamentally, Visualisation engages and excites in ways that other techniques simply do not - it can then embrace the entire enterprise in the most simple and effective way.

4D™ is our approach to solving complex problems.

The 4D™ approach is governed by a set of 4 frameworks and straightforward business logic - The Business Equation™ that ensure the business - and each leader within that business - has the ability to think - and in the widest possible context - about the future aims and ambitions of the business and every major question, issue or opportunity that may arise within it.

Unless we have a clear intention as a business we are at the mercy of unbelievable forces. Not simply those of the market but behaviours, ego's, semantics, data, opinion, subjectivity, expertise etc. 4DTM therefore argues quite simply for shared appreciation of some very simple foundations. At the highest level - what is the future we want as a business, what is this business on this earth to resolve or create and how are we planning to get there.

The frameworks force critical conversations leading to decisions in the large and the small on the main levers open to us to consider.

Frameworks are powerful structures designed to understand the complex systems associated with business - its opportunities and its issues. Frameworks are the 'knowledge and decision tables' that enable rigorous collection, collation and arrangement of insight and information. They display the choices available to an organization.

Frameworks are well understood as a way of sharing and comparing ideas and choices within teams. They also provide an effective method of developing a consistent and coherent story that can be articulated by many people for multiple audiences.

4D™ is quite simply the 4 phases of:

1. Discovering what we could do – alignment of the key stakeholders – creating the right context for what is and what is possible. Do we all agree and share common ground and definitions of what we could do?

2. Developing what we should do – of what we have now uncovered/discovered in the Discovering phase and is understood to be required. We are now starting to create strategies, change scenarios – hard plans for the future.

3. Deciding what we will do – which then sorts all of the choices into a coherent set – a journey, a roadmap that leads to the outcomes and finally

4. Deploying what we have agreed we will do – which sustains the transformation or change programme over the long-term.

Informing all our work is a series of principles that we believe differentiate how we work and the results we help our clients produce.

Critical Thinking: To solve the biggest questions clients have. Working in a visual way with logic frameworks and mechanisms to force comprehensive thinking helps business people make smarter strategy and better decisions. This creates real value, exploits opportunity and avoids solving the wrong problems really well.

2. Collaboration & Co-creation. Bring the right people together at the right times and have the important conversations out in the open where everyone can hear the dialog of “what is?”, “what could be?”, “what will be?” and “what is?” What starts out seeming like a big demand on people’s time turns out to be a much more efficient way of working. Collaboration and co-creation across multiple stakeholders force significant engagement and ownership of the delivery.

3. Rigor. We use proven frameworks and tools to simultaneously increase innovation and ingenuity of thinking, while managing good strategic hygiene: doing what is necessary and sufficient to make a high quality decision.

4. Decision Quality. Decision Quality traces back to pioneering work done at MIT in the 1960s. It is the best-in-class way of making decisions in environments where there is a lot of uncertainty, for example, any piece of strategy.

5. Acceleration & Compression. Time is not the friend of most decision processes (and kudos for compressing this project into eight weeks). We use proprietary approaches called Decision Compression and Decision Dialog to balance working quickly and efficiently with including suitable levels of rigor and analysis.

6. Sustainability & Ownership. Because the deliverables are built with the leadership teams there is real sustainability and advocacy, making the artefacts pervasive and practical tools for delivery and change.

7. Understanding & Accountability. All change requires alteration of behaviour. This is the single biggest cause of program failure. The approach is, therefore, built to engage and therefore inclusive and immersive.

We apply these principles to every assignment – every phase of every program of work. We do this because we see businesses pursuing the dream of becoming a 21st Century Organization, but ignoring the simple acts of conversation, logic, co-creation, structure and visualization. 4DTM blends these things perfectly delivering ownership, confidence and engagement – dramatically limiting heat and optimizing light in a way that is eagerly absorbed, and with laser focus, by those who can and must succeed. 4DTM causes effective, efficient performance – accelerated results that can be felt in the enterprise and across the most rigid institutional contexts.

Tackling the question with any 'solution' or technology, tool or technique other than by thinking deeply about the above would be wrong and wasteful. The Structured Visual Thinking™ and 4D™ approach will surface the designs, the architectures and the building blocks needed to do the job of answering the question in an impartial and intelligent way.

Our program designs represent our view of the best utilization of our approach based on what we know today for a given exam question. We always include the rationale behind our thinking and are happy to refine and adapt as needed to make sure we have the best model that works for each client and that will integrate seamlessly with that of your stakeholders.