We've elevated sales team performance to the next level.
There is almost no team in a modern enterprise that needs to master human nature more than sales, and we have a very special relationship with them: We make sure not to waste their time with »techniques« and change manfests, and instead provide fact based explanations of sales-critical behaviors they encounter in their daily work. We strive to help them become better at what they're already good at.
In return, they provide us with the opportunity to do a very exciting type of project: a combined analysis of the cultures of both the supplier and customer side. For this, we support sales teams in convincing their customers to take part in a lightweight culture diagnostic, while the sales organization undergoes a full scale diagnostic.
The outcomes of this have been extraordinary every time: since it is so rare to quantitatively explore social dynamics across organizations, the insights are almost alway unique and new, and reveal amazing options to capture more business.
Averaged out over the last five such projects, this resulted in a 12% increase in business with existing customers. And since these tend to be larger key accounts, this translated into considerable growth.
We have turned warring factions into tight-knit teams.
And not just for a few months, but for good.
Getting sworn enemies to forge an alliance for a while is easy. But fully understanding a mismatch, and then designing interventions and environments that bring them together, is a daunting but doable task.
When you're planning your restructuring or merger, you focus on combining capability. But for these newly combined capabilities to actually manifest, you need cultural compatibility – otherwise all that talent is too busy enduring each other instead of reaching for the moon.
We have made countless teams genuinely discover each other as valuable companions: not through trust falls and casual Fridays, but by giving them a factual, non-judgemental language to understand, calmly debate, and finally settle their differences.
We have taught leaders to wield culture as a tool.
In business school, nobody really teaches you about culture.
Sure, there might have been the occasional mention of outdated teachings, like those of Edgar Schein, or of that famous »culture eats strategy for breakfast« quote. There might even have been some encounters with dubious pseudoscience like MBTI or DISC.
But for most leaders, culture remains a very abstract and overarching concept that is perceived as very important, but never operationalized. It never becomes an everyday tool for shaping the trajectory of an organization or its individual teams.
We have run numerous decision makers, from CEOs to young talents, through our highly pragmatic leadership development sessions about making culture actionable. We've brought them up to speed on the current science, and taught them how to actively leverage it, every day, as an effective asset, as part of the capital that is at their disposal.
Our favorite reaction so far? "This should be a TED-Talk."
We think so, too.
We have connected teams to new technology.
Few things hurt organizations more than technology that is bought but not adopted. It binds capital but doesn't contribute to productivity, it displaces previously functioning systems without picking up the slack, and it demand intense corrective attention. Deployed ≠ used.
But whether it’s grounded airplanes or unused software: adoption rarely fails because of the technology, since nowadays even the most daring systems »just work«. The cause is instead human nature.
A new way of doing things might be objectively better and faster, but existing methods are already learned and effortless. And to humans, »effortless« trumps »better« every time. See for yourself: we challenge you to learn this obviously better and faster technique of tying your shoes without feeling frustrated and drawn to the »old way«.
Technology adoption is one of the most studied sociological processes, since it is so relevant for the times we live in. Almost all research shows that every team needs their own unique pathway to adoption, and that there is no »one size fits all« solution. We have worked out these paths for dozens of organizations across the globe, and our track record proves us right: On average, we take six months to sustainably increase use rates by 30% – without changing anything about the technology.
A few years ago, in the same timespan, we even got a very large sales team (≈400) from 20% up to 65%, and that rate has been continuously growing ever since.
We have significantly improved productivity with minor tweaks.
Most leaders aren't aware of the countless little tweaks you can do to organizational culture in order to quickly and noticeably increase performance.
You're probably already tracking your teams' capabilities: what are they trained to do? What are they good at? What tasks have they successfully completed in the past?
But can you also quantify how well their social and procedural surroundings support them in bearing the burden of their assigned tasks?
Your most experienced crew will perform worse than a bunch of trainees if they're just slightly overextended, or forced to tiptoe around preposterous behavioral norms, or have been promoted out of a job they did really well into a job that only brings them sorrow.
Since sociological metrics can both determine and predict if a team's situation will allow for their full productive potential, we've leveraged it countless times to precisely define what conditions and surroundings our clients' teams needs to thrive, and if there are any small but hard hitting interventions that could result in massive improvements.
We've accompanied the implementation of numerous such tweaks, and they have always resulted in not only solid, but most of all sustainable improvements in output and efficiency.
We have saved investments from corruption.
One of the most exciting things about modern quantitative sociology is how often it is used for forensic analyses: numerous organizations do their very first sociological assessment when they're in deep trouble, whether it's in the context of a #metoo incident, or when there have been massive breaches of trust.
This is sad for the affected companies, but great for everyone else: it gives us access to extensive sociometric datasets that provide us with the ability to uncover the behavioral and cultural patterns that either lead to or indicate a risk of corruption or fraud.
Every time we saw these patterns in our customers' data, something massive did come up. The resulting investigations always confirmed that there were indeed compliance issues in the corresponding teams. In one case, a leadership team had been receiving substantial bribes and sharing business secrets for years without anyone noticing. In another case, we uncovered a whole department's normalized misuse of power, resulting in another, subordinated team being on the verge of doing something stupid.
In the realm of compliance, computational sociology just works.
We have made mergers & acquisitions easier for everyone.
This is our origin: we did our very first sociological analysis of teams in the context of a large international merger about twenty years ago. This means that we have two decades of extensive experience in evaluating the fit between merging teams, of accurately predicting what their post-merger dynamics will be, and how much effort and cost will be incurred in the process of homogenizing distinct organizations into one functional unit.
Our experience reaches way beyond diagnostics again: we've both contributed and run point on post merger integration processes, supplying both the personnel side as well as the process design side with insights that kept everything running smoothly. We've even won international awards for M&A initiatives that were driven by insights about culture and behavior. And we've supported corporate development teams in the actual work of designing the merger.
The effect of our involvement was always significant: less friction, less frustration, team designs that worked like a charm instead of resulting in conflict, and significantly reduced loss of talent.
We have shaped some of the most successful brands of our time.
In their quest for brand authenticity, companies must face one of the most challenging tasks imaginable: coming to terms with who they really are. In the corporate world, there's no lack of masterfully crafted self-images and mission statements, but to the outside world, these only ring true if they actually are.
Our culture diagnostics reveal just that: what an organization is really like. The brand images crafted on that basis are not only way more intriguing and attractive than run-of-the-mill talk of trust and innovation, they also become a tool that reliably does something, like justifying a price premium. There is no disconnect anymore between what a brand claims to be and what it can actually deliver.
We've removed this disconnect for a dozen well known brands that today still rely on the groundwork we've established years ago.
We have built beachheads into international markets.
Setting up operations in a foreign country is exciting and rewarding, but too many teams think that the only new culture they need to come to terms with is the national culture.
You of course need to master the handshake, the language and the national norms. But just reflect on the diversity of cultures in your own country: not everyone is the same, or even similar. Your sector, your own organization, and all your individual teams have their specific routines and behaviors, and it's the same around the world.
When your newly assembled research team in France isn't performing as expected, its very likely not due to them being french. We've helped organizations understand such situations objectively, free of disorienting bias, and taught them that the solutions that have worked at home might not work in France.
Beyond that, we've empowered marketing teams to find out what makes their product relevant in a whole other cultural context, to understand which so far secondary features or flaws will be blindingly obvious to new sets of eyes.