CASE STUDIES

Simon ran a substantial business with nine subsidiary companies. He had realised that this wasn’t working and that he would need to consolidate and make some serious changes. However, the major shareholder was his Chairman and their relationship was rather strained. Simon felt that the Chairman was always looking over his shoulder, ready to criticise him if he failed. This was seriously impeding his efforts to implement change, and was causing significant stress between the two of them.

Experiential Enterprise™ revealed that in fact his Chairman was not looking for him to fail, nor was he planning to block Simon’s changes: all he wanted was to be part of the process and to be valued by being asked his opinion.

There have been many reorganisations since then including Simon moving down to Marketing Director leaving Chris to be MD. Now Simon is back as MD and Chris is Chair again!

Chris had bought a family business three years ago but was very dissatisfied with his management team and wanted to find out which of them he should replace.

Experiential Enterprise™ showed that actually the team worked quite well together and were all competent; what was missing was the respect and recognition due to the original founder of the business, whose value and heritage was not being acknowledged. The small matter of placing a picture of the founder in the reception area was enough to turn the company around.

Business has boomed ever since.

Richard had a business that had been handed down through his family over generations. Over time, family members had given up board positions and employees had taken on directorships and responsibilities for day to day running of the firm — a significant change in the organisation.

Richard was facing a personal dilemma: his analysis suggested that he should now become non-executive, leaving his managing director to run things (and this coincided with his personal ambition to pursue other interests); but he was concerned that his directors might feel they were being abandoned, and that his grandfather might disapprove.

Through Experiential Enterprise™ Richard discovered that his directors would approve of the change to non-executive provided he did not become too remote, and that his grandfather would support Richard being able to pursue his other interests.

Richard comments: “It was interesting how the Representatives in the system gave information about the organisation that was so accurate”. Armed with these insights Richard introduced his changes and he reports: “One year on from the workshop, the business is successfully in the hands of my directors and I take a back seat in the company”.

Luis was chief executive of a business that was suffering from strained relations between the heads of two divisions. One division had been a core activity for some time; the second had been more recently established. Both heads were competent and able; their divisions serviced different parts of the industry, but they needed to cooperate on projects because each had a particular expertise that was used by the other’s division.

Luis had tried many conventional methods of dealing with this situation and was beginning to fear that he might need to replace one of them. There was a clear difference in length of service, but Luis told us that he valued people on merit not on longevity, and that this way of working was known to all of his team.

Experiential Enterprise™ diagnosed that the primary cause of tension was the lack of respect shown by the new division’s head for the achievements and standing of the core division’s head. All people in a system have a rightful place, which must be acknowledged by others if there is to be harmony; length of service is a fact that needs to be recognised in order for people to work together successfully.

The business is doing well again especially the States which looked like it may have to close.

“[Constellations] provide a physical representation of underlying and unspoken issues which I was then able to put in order.”

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