Who needs tools anyway?

About a year ago, Clayton Christensen’s article ‘Consulting on the cusp of disruption’ kicked off a debate here about the future of the Wolff Olins business.

He argued that the future success of consultancies relies on helping clients “beyond the traditional project based model”, without “deploying more human capital” to scale and grow. For Wolff Olins that begs a question; how can we — as a creative consultancy — be useful to clients beyond projects and without just throwing more people at their problem? The answer, he suggests, lies in developing tools that can be leveraged both by leadership and their organisations — in a way that’s responsive, impactful and scalable.

With this in mind, two different insights have given us steer on our way forward. Firstly, our annual client survey, which strongly suggests leaders need help in multiplying action. What we mean by that is, not just changing employee behavior at the centre of an organisation but changing employee behavior throughout the organisation; right to the very edges. We’re talking geographically, across multiple departments, and right to the frontline staff.

The challenge of scale really comes into this, particularly when you’re an organisation of our size. As a relatively small business of 200 people, often we’re brought in to influence and change companies of 100,000+ people. When we’re looking at these kinds of numbers, tools are essential to get the reach and influence the leaders we work with need.

Our upcoming 2015 leadership report provided another insight; leaders are telling us that it’s individuals who are at the heart of driving change. Leaders want to tap into the knowledge and skills of these talented individuals, to help make the culture of the organisation more innovative. And they’re now ready to adapt and mould the organisation around people, to encourage this kind of environment.

We want to equip organisations with the skills and capabilities that enable the change these ambitious leaders are looking for. Kitchen from Wolff Olins — our school that provides learning to businesses — is evolving rapidly with this in mind. The idea behind Kitchen is that the most important things to individuals often don’t get taught. Based on 50 years’ experience of working with some of the world’s most successful brands, we’re now teaching skills like how to lead, how to develop a creative culture, and how to workshop.

Through our first public course on Futurelearn ‘The Secret Power of Brands’ we’ve already reached 30,000+ learners. A series of workshops and online classes have followed, where we’ve taught 350+ learners this year. The feedback we’re getting tells us that the learning experience we’re building is really personal and useful. Senior leaders from The Guardian to EE, Gap to the Wellcome Trust, Macmillan Cancer Support to Microsoft are already using it. Whether it’s to develop the skill-sets they need in order to change, or to plug in to expertise they are missing in their own organisation.

We’re now developing Kitchen version two to integrate the learning experience into and alongside our strategic project work through an online platform. The combination of our project work and learning content together can be a more complete resource for ambitious leaders; where we not only facilitate the development of their leadership story , but also help equip their people with the know-how and the skills to make that actionable at scale.

And in the past year we’ve had real success experimenting with other types of tools beyond learning too:

• For testing, helping a major American financial services company reinvent their branch network
• For managing, changing the way one of the world’s leading technology companies manages user experience
• For collaborating, bringing together teams from four different markets to pilot new ways of working together

In the next year, we want to bring these tools together into a single experience that our clients can adopt and use — with or without us. Learning gives us a great approach around which we can build on in the future.

This post was originally published on our blog by Richard Houston. To find out more about what new skills we can develop for the people and teams within your organisation — check out http://kitchen.wolffolins.com/.