Below you'll find some brief descriptions of our offering areas:

Strategic Decision & Policy Support

It has become commonplace to point out that the strategic issues facing leaders today – in both the public and private sectors – are more complex and rapidly changing than ever before. However, it is still rare to find well-conceived approaches for dealing with the confusion generated by complexity and rapid change.

Likewise it has become fashionable to call for more broadly inclusive and integrative approaches to the intertwining issues we face, but difficult to find good guidelines for effective transdisciplinary, trans-organisational, and multistakeholder collaboration.

This is the common source of ‘stuckness’ we encounter when working with leadership teams: the mismatch between the complexity of the strategic issues they’re tasked with managing and the inadequacy of the tools they have to deal with these difficult issues.  The problem is never a shortage of knowledge or intelligence, but merely an unfamiliarity with the conceptual tools and pragmatic processes that can support complex integrative thinking.

Over the past 15 years we have honed our expertise in helping clients deal with the conjoined problems of complexity, change, and the integration of diverse knowledge and viewpoints.  From helping technology companies grapple with new product launches, to assisting public sector organizations formulate evidence-based policy, shiftN applies a variety of sophisticated ideas and tools all aimed at a simple result: generating a broader and more accurate understanding of the difficult issues we face.

By engaging with clients to:

• facilitate meaningful conversations
• build integrative visual models
• and play-out the implications of our systemic understanding into the future

shiftN helps strategic decision makers pull together the diverse strands of multidimensional issues and expand the boundaries of their thinking.  From this more accurate and inclusive vantage point, leaders are in a better position to translate their shared knowledge into more innovative and synergistic solutions.

Strategic Innovation

The innovation landscape is changing. Companies used to ask “how” they could do things differently. Now they are asking “what” they can do differently. The latter question is strategic, existential. It is about finding a transition to a new license to operate. It is about finding solutions to questions that are not even well articulated:

• What is “sustainability” and how does it affect our business?

• What future role will biomass play in human affairs and what does that mean for our technology portfolio?

• What is “mental capital” and how can we enhance it?

• What does the plight of 2 billion poor people mean to our business?

• What do our stakeholders expect from us?

These questions are at the business “fuzzy front end”. Likely they cannot be meaningfully answered by cycling through a standardised ideation process. To tackle these questions, shiftN brings together different competencies:

•  Conceptual thinking to stretch the canvas and deepen the horizon against which these questions take on shared meaning

•  Research capacity to detect weak signals and emerging needs

•  Design and visualisation skills to turn this understanding into tangible concepts

•  Business insight to assess the potential of these concepts and their impact on the business model

•  Mobilisation skills to revitalise the capacity to act in the organisation

Many of these questions cannot be tackled in splendid isolation. We believe in the potential of collaborative or open innovation, building unconventional alliances across industry boundaries and constituencies. shiftN has brought together Open Innovation Laboratories involving players from many different industries representing tens of billions of euros. 

shiftN is also committed to help businesses discover the enormous value in attending to the wider social and environmental challenges facing our world. We can help businesses to tune into these concerns, understand them better and explore how they might enrich their value creation model.

Futures work

Futures work requires a wide range of skills from practitioners, including the ability to understand what the client really wants. We don’t “do scenarios”. Instead we carefully craft an intervention relying on, for example, the scenario methodology to achieve a very specific objective:

•  To help the business create future value creation opportunities

•  To wind tunnel an important investment decision

•  To align different parts of the organisation on its strategic priorities

•  To provide the organisation with a better antenna to make sense of complex strategic issues

The key is to embed a variety of futures approaches – scenarios, visioning, future search, soft systems methodology, appreciative enquiry, system dynamics modeling, etc. - into a coherent intervention architecture taking into account a range of boundary conditions (objectives, complexity, resources, etc.) set by the client organisation.

Futures work benefits from good quality input. The ability to process and provide easy access to large amounts of qualitative and quantitative information is important. We rely on sophisticated research and visualisation skills to do so. Sometimes we take people on a journey to have firsthand experience of new trends and cutting edge developments.

Indeed, futures work is not confined to the desktop. It involves bringing together many different people – experts, decision makers, frontline people, stakeholders – to jointly build up images of possible futures by challenging each others’ mental maps. Top notch facilitation skills are necessary to shepherd these groups through an intellectually (and emotionally) taxing experience.

Good conceptual skills are necessary to make sense of the large volumes of confusing data, to bring intellectual discipline to the process and to pull groups beyond the stereotype “2-by-2” scenario matrix into more challenging territory.

Finally, whatever the results of a futures-based intervention, it is not meant to sit on a shelf. The organisation needs to be mobilised to act on the new insights. This requires good communication and mobilisation skills. If needed, we pull in specialist designers to visualise the future in new business ideas and to create momentum across the organisation.

Multistakeholder Dialog

Collaboration and cooperation are paramount for success in a world of increasing interconnectivity.  Stakeholders of issues around the world need to engage and talk – whether they like it or not:

•  Governments need to motivate communities to contribute with solutions to complex societal issues,

•  Multicultural communities need to minimize conflict and maximize the value of their shared space in society,  

•  Businesses need to form long-term partnerships with customers, employees, governments, analysts, suppliers, NGOs.

The variety of ideas, claims and expectations held by different stakeholders in regards to complex issues can often be under l; estimated, and the outcome of unguided conversation can easily reduce to the lowest common denominator.  shiftN makes use of tools, theories and processes but above all, highly skilled facilitation to ensure conversations deliver:

• All stakeholders' perspectives taken into account

•  Diversity of views exploited to create maximum win-wins

•  Conflict, power struggles or simple perceived differences effectively channeled

•  Energy and drive combined with objective action planning and agreement on next steps

Whether as part of an overall strategic review or a stand-alone mediation of a single complex issue, good quality multistakeholder dialog is more than just a ‘nice-to-have’ item, but a prerequisite for effective and efficient solutions.

Multistakeholder dialogues should always look beyond conflict resolution and damage minimization. With that ambitious underlying goal in mind, shiftN designs processes making use of artefacts and formats such as future scenarios, large group interventions, visual models, games and others to establish common platforms, shared context and understanding.  This, in turn, together with strong and enthusiastic facilitation, encourages trust and relationships to develop, provokes sharing of ideas and opinions and builds collective learning thus capacity.  The end-goal is to build social capital, to form networks of stakeholders who thrive on their competing interests and perspectives as they find ground breaking solutions.

Learning Experiences

People learn best when they are engaged. And they are engaged when they creatively interact with their environment.

For many years, shiftN has been developing smart, customised learning games to support exciting and effective learning experiences. We’ve built games:

•  to help budding venture capitalists to come to grips with the finer points of their business cycle

• to help tens of thousands of employees of a global company to reflect on their company values

• to help pharmaceutical research scientists develop more effective experimentation strategies

• to help new employees to get to know the breadth of the business and company policies in a playful way

• to help line managers to have more effective appraisal talks with their collaborators

Each of these learning games has been developed from scratch to optimally reflect the client’s culture, language, technology and business model. shiftN collaborates with talented designers to turn challenging learning objectives into imaginative, captivating experiences for teams and learners throughout the whole organisation.

In addition, shiftn is a certified Lego Serious Play partner. LSP is a Lego bricks-based, flexible platform for the development of a wide range of fun but seriously engaging processes of team-based problem solving. Please contact us for more information. 

Click here for the Lego Serious Play web site

Click here for our PDF brochure on Learning Games & Learning Labs