TrueColoursV3 | for-your-organization

Does this happen in your organization too?

As a (vice)rector, dean, academic administrator, faculty director or member of the supervisory staff, you and your institute, university or college are constantly facing challenges.
Some examples:

You have questions about the vision, mission and strategy of your institute, the faculty, the department: how to (re)develop them? How to discover what connects you in a merger of institutes, departments, …? How to handle strategy and translate it into big, bold moves?

You want a new vision on leadership. What kind of leadership does your organization need? What roles do you want your leaders to take on? And what about shared leadership: leadership should be taken on by everybody, but how to achieve this?

A new culture in your organization, that's what you're aiming for. What will become your ‘new normal’, your DNA (Daily Natural Attitude)? More interdisciplinary collaboration, sense of responsibility, an open feedback culture, ...?

You’re launching a new organization model, a different collaboration between groups, a different relationship between ‘central’ and the faculties or departments, with less hierarchy and more autonomy. What are the consequences for your structure? And for your roles and responsibilities?

You’re wondering which governance model you need to run your institute. What composition, authority and interactions do you envisage for the various managerial committees?

Do some of these questions sound familiar? You’re not alone: we hear them often from our clients in the academic and scientific environments. We’ll tackle them together!

Our offer

You have made clear choices about where you want to go. In other words, guiding principles, translated into, for example, strategy, leadership and culture.

There is more ownership, responsibility and support through a combination of strong leadership on the one hand and far-reaching participation on the other hand.

You will not receive long texts with analyses of the past – but rather a limited set of future scenarios and, in particular, tangible ideas for implementing them. We regard this as logical, since we start implementation as from Day 1.

The workability of new principles has already been tested with experiments. Even if the new organization is not yet there, you are already acting ‘as if’. This saves you a great deal of time.

Failing forward, consent decision-making, teal: you and your colleagues achieve a higher level of performance and become more critical, more self-willed and more ambitious.

Broaden your perspective
We provide new insights and challenge you continuously. And just when you think ‘Where is this going?’, we find the common thread together. We conclude with the ‘So what?’ test: what is different, what is new, why should this work?

Choose what works for you
Forget the sacred cows or traditional models. We start from a blank sheet and first make your question crystal clear. During the project, we constantly monitor the fit with your organization. Do we give our opinion as well? You can count on it!

Launch specific actions
We don’t do lengthy as-is-analysis or off-hand insights and models. During the process, we already get you started and start immediate implementation through different experiments. The key? The action plan after each step.

Get everyone onboard
The client, the internal project leader, the internal change team, and the necessary sounding board groups: together we carefully develop a project architecture in which we involve all relevant stakeholders.

The bonus? You can come to us both during and after the process. ‘You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave ...’

How do we tackle your challenges?

Change team in the driving seat

Do you want to implement a change that involves your entire organization and do you therefore require knowledge & experience from multiple parties? Then, we put together an internal project team with representatives from all parties involved. And yes, dissident voices are also welcome.

We define challenging principles instead of strict rules and procedures. Together we develop real proposals and we launch experiments to make your change a success. The goal? Taking steps forward and getting everyone on board.

Strategy workshop

Defining your vision/mission? Making important strategic choices for the near future? A strategy workshop – with your executive team – will put you on the right track:

You map out the strategic context and challenges.
Spice it up: what is your ‘why’, intention, purpose?
What direction are you heading for? Make your strategic bets.
You translate these into wildly important goals.
You achieve these goals together and know how you will follow up the implementation.

Organization design

Upgrading your organization? Finding solutions to tailor it even more closely to the challenges you’re facing? Incorporating agility from the start, so that you are always ready for new challenges? This workshop will accomplish this ambition:

We start from your vision and mission and from other choices that have already been made.
We focus on your challenges and translate them into clear organizational principles.
We develop these principles into a limited number of scenarios or organizational design proposals.
We test the scenarios and proposals in experiments and ‘minimal viable processes’.
We translate the chosen designs into roles, functions and teams.

The result? A transition plan that is widely supported, because we involved all parties at every step.

Participation workshop

Ideal for involving many – or very diverse – stakeholders in a decision:

Employees, customers, users, administrators, etc.: they all provide input and evaluate proposals. They work on questions such as ‘What are our challenges?’, ‘What do we want instead?’, ‘What is already working?’ and ‘What small steps can we already take now?’

During the process, we work with small groups, plenary feedback, market moments, brainstorms, work sessions, online polls and discussions. With ‘We bet …’, ‘What if’ and other creative working methods, the participants arrive at real proposals.

Inspiration workshop

With these workshops you are inspired from the start of a change process by innovative and relevant insights and examples from outside. The goal? To challenge your current way of thinking and broaden your perspective. We invite interesting speakers and bring inspiration ourselves.

Survey

Do you want to involve a large group of stakeholders in a decision, but is it physically impossible to bring them all together? Then choose a survey to collect input efficiently, process it and use it in one or more other working methods.

We have numerous tailor-made surveys. An example? Our quick scan, which measures the agility of your organization. View a sample report here.

Guerilla Goodness

Do you want to change your practices and habits in your organization? Originating from the employees’ initiative – perhaps even without a mandate from above? Then you can certainly use some Guerilla Goodness. This innovative change technique allows change to emerge bottom-up.

Squads are formed around the topics and get carte blanche to conduct positive, surprising and pattern-breaking experiments for a period of time. Then, the evaluation: which experiments do you integrate into your daily activities, which ones do you drop?

Guerilla Goodness works perfectly for provoking positively, causing disruption and getting things moving. Count on us for inspiration – for example, by means of a boot camp about essential Guerilla skills.

True Colours offers a very strong process consultation, with a lot of empathy for the specific organizational context and a profound understanding of its particularity. They combine this tailor-made, independent process consultation with state of the art advice & insights concerning the content of the challenges we’re facing (eg developing possible models for our new organization). They guarantee, also in complex contexts with multiple stakeholders, an adequate consultation of these different players. True Colours enabled us for example to achieve a swift change in a context where consecutive policy makers had left problems pending for too long. True Colours’ biggest assets are their empathy, their expertise in organizational behaviour & structures (without clinging to one single model or vieion) , their process consultation skills and their experience with and knowledge of our organisation, acquired through recurring collobarations over the past 15 years.

Luc Sels, Rector, KU Leuven

For your organization

University, university college, research institute or other scientific or educational organization? From vision/mission to culture to governance model: together we will tackle your challenges.