s your Business Optimisation Team missing something elusive? We can help!

Our expertise is in improving end-to-end organisational performance.  We have a way of quickly and reliably identifying the performance leverage points in challenging situations - and developing simple, small footprint, disproportionate-impact interventions for securing dramatic improvement.

Business Optimisation teams are often low on one or more of the following essential skills:

1. Process Optimisation (if your team has been unable to reduce lead-time, increase throughput or improve quality of suboptimal processes, the gap might be here).
   Click here for brief notes on our approach.
2. Project Delivery (if your team is battling to deliver to schedule, the gap might be here).
   Click here for brief notes on our approach.
3. Creating a Pull-System For Change (if your organisation is resisting the change, the gap in capability could be here).
   Click here for brief notes on our approach.
4. Solution Development (if everything else is fine, but the impact of your team's interventions could be better, the gap could be here).
   Click here for brief notes on our approach.

Browse this site to find out more about us and our approach - and please contact Gary Bartlett for a confidential, no-obligation chat on relieving the constraints on your organisation's performance.   | 0800 776-276

Our solution library contains breakthrough solutions to the seemingly impossible-to-solve problems and challenges that constrain performance in the following organisational functional areas:

1. Marketing Solutions: For deliberately and systematically growing demand for products and services.
2. Sales Solutions: For deliberately and systematically increasing sales throughput while optimising buy-cycle duration.
3. Customer Services Solutions: For increasing customer satisfaction dramatically, while reducing resourcing requirements and efforts.
4. Distribution Solutions: For improving availability, reducing inventory and disseminating marketing, sales and support expertise.
5. Operations Solutions: For streamlining operations performance and improving staff satisfaction and mastery.
6. R&D Solutions: For delivering advanced late-generation innovation in a fraction of the normal time that primitive early-generation innovation requires.
7. Product Development & Management Solutions: For accelerating product performance, sales and profitability.
8. HR Solutions: For deliberately enhancing organisational culture, capability, satisfaction and performance.
9. IT Solutions: For improving IT Service delivery speed, quality, business enablement and satisfaction.
10. Project Solutions: For delivering projects and programmes faster, better, more easily and predictably and less expensively.
11. Finance Solutions: For equiping Finance to equip the business to exploit hidden value asymmetry and leverage. 
12. Management Solutions: For accelerating management capability and performance, increasing both control and freedom. 

We've built up a library of over 100 solutions over the years.  They fall into the following primary domains:

1. Person|People Solutions: For improving individual and collective engagement, productivity, capability, ingenuity, collaboration, leadership, performance and satisfaction.
2. Process|Practice Solutions: For improving the speed, effectiveness, efficiency and quality of processes and the practices that drive them.
3. Problem|Opportunity|Situation Solutions: For deliberately and systematically solving seemingly intractable problems, creating and capitalising on elusive opportunities and taking advantage of and turning around challenging situations.
4. Plant|System Solutions: For optimising equipment, machinery and information technology systems.
5. Product/Service Solutions: For deliberately accelerating the evolution of products and services.
6. Project|Programme Solutions: For enhancing, accelerating, streamlining and energising project and programme performance.

1. Dramatic improvement is eminently possible in EVERY situation - without exception.

   It doesn't matter how challenging the situation is - or how much time we have - we can always secure dramatically better outcomes and experiences than we are currently securing.   It's perfectly - unavoidably - natural to be skeptical of this claim, but it is demonstrably, unequivocally true.

   There are no exceptions: every single situation can be improved dramatically - no matter how intractable it may seem.

2. The key is LEVERAGE: the more challenging the situation, the greater the leverage opportunity.

   Dramatic improvement arises from leverage.  If things improve dramatically, leverage must have been employed.  If leverage is employed advantageously, the improvement will be dramatic.

   Truly challenging situations are challenging because of dynamic complexity - strong and complex interactions between the elements of the situation.  So the more challenging the situation (the greater the dynamic complexity) the greater the leverage.  And the greater the leverage the more dramatic the potential for improvement.

   There is no limit to leverage, because reality is infinitely leveragable.  The key to dramatic improvement is to find the leverage points and figure out how to use them to secure the improvements we seek.

3. The problem is, WE CAN'T SEE the leverage points – not that they aren't there.

   There is always another level of leverage – hidden, in plain hindsight, in the reality beyond the one we can currently see. The problem is that we can't see those leverage points, until we see them, because they are beyond our current capability to see - not because they aren't there.

   One of the primary reasons that we can't see leverage points, is because they are counter-intuitive to the previous level of insight.  It's only when we see and truly understand them that they begin to make sense.

   This is a non-trivial human-condition problem, rooted in our physiology: we don't (can't) know - or take into consideration or take advantage of - what we don't realise that we don't know we don't know.  It's called unconscious incognizance and it comes in many forms, ranging between the extremes of being unable to "see" solutions we're deliberately looking for and afterwards turn out to be in front of our noses, to  "forgetting" key elements of a situation or solution that we are intimately familiar with, but not taking into consideration at the time.

   Unconscious Incognizance is compounded by the Half-life of One Sleep problem: when we're first exposed to new insights, we lose 50% of the new insight a day, unless we recreate and reinforce the new insight.  This is because the insight is established virtually at first, commandeering existing neural networks and connections temporarily - and only gets established physiologically and "permenantly" through repetition under neuroplasticity-inducing conditions.

   It's harder to overcome unconscious incognizance than one might think, because we're already doing the best we can to gain deeper insight – and are easily convinced that, because we can't see beyond the leverage points we've already identified, no further leverage points exist.

   We're perpetually trapped within our own thinking. We think we're seeing reality as it really is, but we're really only seeing what we're able to see, recognise and make sense of.  And every time we escape one layer of unconscious incognizance – an escape which comes about only when a specific combination of "crucible" conditions exist – we find ourselves trapped in the next level of insight. And the cycle repeats. Infinitum.

   So we settle – individually and collectively – for mediocrity, because it seems the best - the only - option we have.

4. The solution is to use Universal Leverage Patterns as congnitive scaffolding to find the next level of leaverage opportunities.

   Dynamically complex adaptive systems (which is what challenging situations are) are made up of repeating patterns.  We seldom see the patterns, because our education system doesn't teach us to look for patterns when we get stuck.  Instead it teaches us to analyse (break things into their component parts), which makes the interactions and the patterns across them even harder to see.  The patterns that we're most interested in are dramatic improvement (leverage point) patterns, of course.  

   The thing is that, although unconscious incognizance prevents us from seeing the next-level leverage points themselves, it doesn't prevent us from seeing the repeating patterns that they follow.

   Once we can see the patterns across the challenges we face - and the patterns across the interventions we can think of (especially the counter-intuitive ones) we can use these patterns as templates and exemplars – cognitive scaffolding – for finding the next-level leverage points. This enables us to effectively overcome the unconscious incognizance problem, by giving us the form of what we don't know, so that – in a sense – we now know what we don't know looks like.  And, because the patterns repeat throughout the situation, we'll discover that the new leverage points will incorporate key elements of the patterns we already know and use - arranged in a slightly different - counter-intuitive - way.