Systems and Strategy

We incorporate a systems approach into each organizational and social change project. This includes mapping and analysis to enable an organization and its stakeholders to build a common understanding of their whole system’s strengths, issues and opportunities.

Through interviews, group dialogue and mapping of the system, we facilitate a dynamic process of story-telling about how the organization and its larger system currently work—and could potentially work. (See PDF article, Strategic Clarity: Actions for Identifying and Correcting Gaps in Mental Models.)

Telling and analyzing the organization’s story is a critical early transformative step in building and implementing effective strategic and operating plans. We help leaders to see the story of their organization’s current state, its potential and its difficulties as a set of agreements that can be renegotiated to be both more inspirational and more effective.

We have designed a simple, but comprehensive, approach to strategy development that enables our clients to agree upon plans that will shift their entire enterprise in sustainable direction. The acronym GRASP denotes the critical elements and relationships that provide structure for all living systems, including organizations:

Goals Be clear about why the organization exists. Identify its global goal. Identify stakeholders and their goals.
Resources Identify the resources that drive value and those that enable value. Balance the resource needs for all key stakeholders.
Actions Act at the level of enabling resources.
Structure Identify the linkages among the goals, resources and actions.
People Bring the organization or system to life. Identify the incentives of the groups that control its various parts. Align the organization's structure and incentives to maximize its potential.