Is AI upending your business model? Are new competitors emerging from unexpected places? Are customer expectations changing faster than you can meet them?
We hear comments like this from clients and prospective clients all the time. And the pressure is growing – a survey by consulting firm PwC revealed that 45% of CEOs believe their businesses will no longer be viable in ten years’ time if they continue on their current path.
Change brings many opportunities – the chance to launch new products and services, create new markets and evolve existing ways of operating. At the same time, growth and change also lead to something else. Complexity.
Sometimes, your business has grown successfully but when you look back at what you’ve created, the pieces no longer make sense. Or you’ve launched new products and experiences to satisfy customer needs, but now your offer has become way too complicated. Perhaps the people in your organisation have lost track of what it is you really stand for.
This matters. Your business and your brand need simplicity and clarity if they’re going to make sense for your people, your customers and your stakeholders.
When trying to make things simpler, many organisations unwittingly make things worse. If you’re struggling to explain what you’re about, the tendency is to keep adding – more words to explain your purpose, an extra sub-brand for a new product, a refreshed brand pyramid with a new set of values. Sound familiar?
The problem for businesses and organisations is prioritisation. Seen from the inside, everything is critical. Yet how do you pull out those things you really need to tell your story? As one client said to us, “we’ve lived in these clothes so long, but they just don’t fit any longer and we can’t explain ourselves anymore.”
When we work with clients, we start by exploring. We’re like miners, hard hats firmly on, digging into their organisations for those precious elements and assets that sometimes lie buried deep. The truth is in there but it needs to be brought to the surface.
We can then get creative, using those raw materials as the foundation to create or rebuild the organisation’s story.
We call this process dissolving complexity and it’s how we worked with Xynteo.
At first glance, Xynteo looks like a business consultancy but it doesn’t behave like one. Xynteo helps organisations grow in ways that are good for business, good for people and good for the planet. Their way of operating is original, creative and immersive.
Finding a way to express themselves was a huge challenge and one they had been struggling to do themselves.
Our first task was to start digging. Through a variety of techniques, we were able to get to the core of who they are, what they do and why they do it. For example, they explained to us the value of a programme that takes 150 top business leaders into a three-day performance theatre workshop. This unconventional approach delivered ground-breaking change.
Our exploration gave us what we needed to build the Xynteo story. We call it Grow Forward. When we laid out the idea for the team, their eyes lit up. We had identified the essence of what they were all about. We could then take that core thought and build it into a powerful brand platform.
Complexity is inevitable. What matters is how you embrace and make sense of it. Talk to us about how to dissolve the complexity in your organisation.