Category: Case Studies

Fraendi began a working partnership with a Swiss private, entrepreneurial investment firm whose initial request to Fraendi was for Jackie Thoms to work as an Executive Coach with a Senior Leadership Team Member. This initial relationship was tended to with transparency and rigour. As a result, the company’s Chairman and owner invited Jackie and her co-founder Rainer von Leoprechting to deliver more interventions across the organisation over time and bring in more Fraendi Consultants. 

This has led to a 5-year-long partnership, supporting various key members in 1-1 Coaching work as well as strategy off-sites with 30 senior leaders in the company, team offsites ranging from groups of 9 to 60 people and Executive Media Training, led by Fraendi Associate and former BBC journalist Carissa Bub.

The fundamental issue Fraendi is working with is how a family business can grow and transform into more agile and iterative ways of working to respond to continuous change in unpredictable conditions. This is not an issue that technology alone can solve. It requires ongoing robust and rigorous processes cohering within complex human relationships to meet with a living strategy of engaging new clients and sectors. The PE company needed to fundamentally change their ways of working and operating, develop a platform to support new sectors and continue its excellent service to clients. 

Fraendi is walking alongside the senior leaders launching the transformation programme, paying attention to Leadership, Organisational Development and Participatory Strategy while looking to reshape and reinvigorate their organisational landscape and to support the complexity of their strategy.

A living strategy requires a whole system approach to strategy-making and ways of engaging the group as a ‘living system’. Fraendi understands that using participatory methods invites and allows collective intelligence to be expressed and opens broader conversations and space for people with their inherent human ingenuity to step up and into new roles. This allows the ways forward and the ownership of the strategy to be shared. Inviting and allowing generates momentum, energy and transparency across the system.

“It was like walking into a wall of energy, you could feel the excitement.” Senior Leadership Team member arriving at the living strategy off-site. 

Developmental Profiles have been a cornerstone in making a difference in the client system. Using Developmental Profiles, Fraendi can provide a lens through which the capacities of individuals, the potential each person is realising and what may be possible can be seen. This lens supports people to sense where working relations can work well and where break-downs and non-relating may be. The profiles are being deployed for senior leadership recruitment and promotion into new roles.

The beauty of the Developmental Profiles is that they mirror back to people how they are oriented. The uniqueness of each profile is expressed through observation without judgement, allowing people to be seen and heard. The process is enjoyable, and although it can be challenging for some, the interview and feedback can be the most relational process in which people have ever been ‘held’. The process also helps people understand the system they will be coming into.

The strategy off-sites have unleashed many in the team from habitual patterns of relating into new possibilities of relating. Through the invitation to co-create, the Senior Leadership team has cohered into a more socialised mindset where all 30 of the team contribute to the strategy by projecting and finding their voice. People are allowing themselves to move into relating as a group in ways they would not normally do. The quality of thinking improves as the boundaries of the relationship form a sense of ‘collective thinking’. It is as if something special/spiritual is present in the room – a mood created and held as a kind of ‘facilitator’s grace’.

As a result of the partnership and the work, it is clear how the evolving client system allows people to step up and contribute to coalescing and cohering within a living strategy. Different people have stepped up to lead the transformation programme from within the organisation. Significant change is underway with changes in roles, ways of working, service and delivery expectations for clients and potential clients.

There is ongoing learning about leading complex change programmes from a place of uncertainty and the unknown by focusing on stakeholder needs to move beyond existing service and delivery to what is transformational for the company to lead with their clients and in their sectors. There is clear evidence of the following:

• Growing leadership, including an evolving understanding of the systemic challenges they face in any change or transformation project/strategy.
• More clarity of how they wish to operate and be, more confidence to challenge the status quo.
• Momentum and energy change within relationships.
• A change in languaging as people begin to use their own language in their own systems.
• A shift from an over-reliance on consensus decision-making through a more fluid hierarchy to consent decision-making and prototyping for innovative changes while moving towards self-authoring.
• Broader perspectives of the stakeholders and the contexts they are operating in.
• A broader set of stakeholders which includes other families, investors, and the next generation.

This case study shows the importance of inviting and allowing relationships to cohere and coalesce within the complex systems of an organisation’s living strategy. Fraendi works with this company in a trusted relationship, developing a sense of the system and how to support it through a diversity of approaches that recognise that we always have incomplete knowledge of a system and the exact nature of the stochastic leaps it may be able to make. 

Fraendi holds space and perspectives that allow people to develop beyond existing perspectives. The support is being delivered at all levels, from the micro to the strategic. Fraendi is bringing leading-edge ways of working that align more with nature into the culture and the people.

SMA is a leading global specialist in photovoltaic system technology. Their original request to Fraendi was to work with the company’s five most senior managers to improve their ability to collaborate. Rainer had previously met with one of the company’s organisational development staff at a conference who was excited about Fraendi’s new methods and approaches and later participated in the first Fraendi event. A year later, she recommended Rainer to the company’s CFO to consult with the general management circle. After meeting the CEO and CFO, they accepted Fraendi’s proposal to hold a retreat.

A 3-year partnership followed, supporting the five most senior managers in a series of retreats, and coaching three senior managers in building on their leadership profiles. 

Fraendi’s main purpose was to support the business in improving its capacity for transformational and relational thinking while allowing senior managers to work together in a more collegiate way. The business needed to adapt to thrive in a fast-moving, mature renewable energy market that requires a company to be industrially efficient and innovative in developing new systems and ideas. As the market in renewables matured, SMA recognised that it needed to fundamentally change the company culture to a more collegial style to allow it to hold and function in the required modalities and increase product diversity. The company needed senior managers concerned with strategy and strategic issues, not just day-to-day engineering and management decisions.

Fraendi convened a series of three retreats with the general management circle between February 2020 and the end of 2021, when the company decided to restructure in a more entrepreneurial way. During the retreats, Fraendi drew on the Living Strategy Framework to sort and prioritise the issues for exploration and used the Art of Hosting to lead the clients into deep and meaningful work and exchanges with each other. 

During the retreats, Fraendi used the Living Strategy Framework to identify where the leadership team thought their main problem was and then took a step back to find the logical question that preceded it. One whole retreat was held on stakeholder sensing, and it revealed some missing pieces. Fraendi held this delicate space for shifts to coalesce and cohere, subtly accompanying teams and walking alongside them. This held space allowed people to participate naturally, uncover their own possibilities, create a new relational field, and take shared ownership of the strategy. The conditions were created for leadership capacities to grow, for people to bring their whole selves and to ask the questions that needed addressing.

The retreats have made a big difference within the client system. After the first retreat, the participants became increasingly comfortable working on a strategy project. Fraendi accompanied some of the more strategic decision-making in the leadership team and saw how they were adapting to the explosion in demand for renewable energy solutions. However, Fraendi was not so regularly involved to be able to claim any of the outcomes from our interventions directly.

The leadership team has become more effective and faster in decision-making and can take decisions they might not have been able to previously. The CEO decided to restructure the company toward a more entrepreneurial structure. Rainer ran a mini-retreat with the senior manager and his right-hand support to examine everything that could go “wrong” to find the relevant attention points so they could lead their part of the change.

This case study shows the importance of Fraendi’s companionship and artful hosting of a space for participants to coalesce and cohere in designing systemic approaches that completely review and transform business models in a fast-moving sector.

The mental demands on leaders in such environments are high, and like many other companies, SMA has managers who struggle with such conditions. However, with Fraendi walking alongside, changing how people perceive their situation can allow different actions to become available and for people to recognise they can deal with the issues at hand just as the people they are.