Helping you to harness the power of real-time problem solving.
Solving problems ‘in the now’ minimises friction which sharpens performance, profitability, effectiveness and confidence.
What types of problems?
Alacrity Lab supports organisations, businesses and teams to navigate a range of challenges and opportunities, including:
Change
Changing Direction
Changing direction within businesses, across organisations, or within projects.
Leadership Changes
Establishing or changing management or ownership, including succession planning.
Coping with Growth or Decline
Managing growth or decline in expectations, demand and workload – including volume or quality.
Easing Financial Pressure
When you need to be doing more with less - adjusting to being more effective or efficient.
Challenge
Unexpected Disruption
Navigating through market or regulatory shifts, disruptive technologies, and re-calibrating through uncertain times.
Navigating Conflict
Gaining consensus amongst stakeholders, shareholders, boards or working groups. Taking people with you on your journey, or supporting a direction change.
Finding and Keeping Good People
How do you find and keep good people - and balance them with supportive systems and structures.
Getting Stuff Done
Taking a strategy or plan through to action – gearing up for implementation, setting achievable goals and focusing on outcomes.
Context
Hitting the Mark
Sense-testing a potential new venture, direction or opportunity using expert advisory, research and analysis.
How you Stack Up
Comparing yourself to others in your sector, region, organisation or business to gain a realistic view of where you sit, and what this means for your positioning and future direction.
Making the Emotional Connection
The values and ethics of business and organisation practice are vital to how you are seen, understood and operate. How can you pick a fad from something more fundamental?
Doing more with less: mission possible
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Cost cutting is the most painful of change processes because, not only does it result in loss of jobs and expertise but in loss of purpose and confidence, two of the most vital components of a successful organisation.
There are always areas where costs can and should be trimmed but often, and especially in public organisations, we think of cost cutting as the obvious remedy when funds are short.
Instead, let’s view the problem from a different perspective. Can the customer receive the same or more value but also share the cost, without paying more money? Instead of receiving personal service, customers might be directed to a website to serve themselves. It’s more work for them, and less cost for the business, but the value remains the same.
This is demand management, and it can ease cost pressures for a business or public entity whilst retaining customer value and preserving the sense of purpose and confidence within the organisation. There’s a transition involved but it’s easier than we sometimes think. It just involves changes in assumptions and mindsets.
Successful change is not mission impossible. It just means looking at a challenge from every which way so that effective solutions can be found that won’t undermine your organisation’s value.
Employer of choice: more than just a nice idea
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It’s a demand and supply problem. There are a few reality factors that are causing this problem including falling birth rates, the lag effect of Covid-related immigration restrictions, the post-Covid exodus of talent and changing attitudes to work. The reality is there are just not enough people in the employment market to go around.
The topic of becoming an employer of choice is a popular subject at business seminars, but does it work in the real world? Regrettably, it’s not easy but it is possible. The temptation is to see it as providing staff with further benefits – salary increases, work from home privileges, increased sick leave allocations and so on. Undoubtedly these benefits help but they are not usually the nub of the problem. Too many employers provide these benefits and still lose people.
The real challenge is the nature of the employee experience. What does it feel like to work at your place? Do I feel appreciated? Am I doing meaningful work? Am I able to express my talents in this job and get better at it? Am I working in an enterprise that shares my values?
The change journey from providing an ordinary to an exceptional employee experience, done right, is more than a nice idea – it’s crucial to the resilience and future success of any organisation. It’s a long journey, made up of small increments.
Relevance: a total state of being
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Think back to the early days of EFTPOS which was universally regarded as a solution searching for a problem, but it eventually did find a problem – merchants (and consumers) having to manage too much cash. Each day there was inflation, the relevance of EFTPOS grew.
The smart phone was not a response to a felt need, but at a certain point its use simply took off world-wide. It had a relevance we didn’t initially fully understand.
Why do we need irrigation in a country with lots of rain? In other parts of the world where irrigation involves turning desert into productive land, there is high relevance and little or no opposition. Here, where irrigation is designed to take already productive land and make it more productive, it has hit constant roadblocks.
Typewriters are now relevant only to museums, but vinyl records have a fresh meaning in a contemporary world.
Relevance is like sailing a yacht. The better it can point onto the wind, the faster it goes. The skill of the sailor is in reading wind shifts and adjusting to them.
Many companies start out being exceptional, energetic and relevant. As they grow there is a dark and powerful force that pulls them away from the exceptional to the average, and with it comes the problems of average – variable profitability, staff turnover, internal politics, competitive pressures and so on. Relevance is not an ad slogan, it’s a total state of being.
The thrill of relevance is intoxicating and to recapture it, a change journey is often required. Ironically, it may be about relearning old skills, recapturing lost energy, recalibrating the course and re-engaging lost mindsets. How can your relevance be… more relevant?
