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 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.