Strategic Change

Working with leaders who care to drive strategic change, bringing greater health and effectiveness to stakeholder groups – that’s the work we love most. Because it’s about making a difference – and we want to give you the best shot at having the greatest effect, with the lowest risk of negative side-effects. Driving optimal outcomes is what we care about most, and what we’ve done best.

The CT Labs team members are all PROSCI Certified, but driving strategic change is far more than a process, and it’s organization-based. In our world, change drives projects. Projects don’t drive change.

Although CT Labs can be brought in to make a good thing better (and we’d recommend it!), most clients figure they can do that part. We are usually engaged in situations that are fraught – sometimes HIGHLY fraught. Our clients have been lead stories on newscasts (and not happy ones), they’ve been bleeding tens of millions of dollars a week, they’ve been less than two months from bankruptcy. Yes, we’ve taken gigs where, if we didn’t succeed, we didn’t get paid – because NO ONE was going to get paid! That’s our type of gig.

We can be brought in at any point in a change initiative, and we can stick around as long as necessary. Sometimes we are dropped in as a “black ops” team for a week or two; often we are around for a couple months to help a client find and carve out a new path, and we regularly have a client or two who keeps us around on part-time assignment for a couple years or more, as strategic change advisors to the CEO, leadership team or Board.

To subvert a concept invented by a valued peer, challenges can be simple, complicated, complex or chaotic.

• Simple challenges you can handle yourself. Or you can have someone else take care of them. We issue instructions in emails, text messages and over the phone on an ongoing basis. Many of these (hopefully!) address simple challenges.
• Complicated challenges require a good project manager. The difference between complicated and complex challenges is that complicated challenges have solutions. Complex ones don’t. Complex situations can only be managed forward – more effectively or less effectively. Want an example? Building a space shuttle is complicated. It’s not complex. You need a project manager, you need to do perhaps 10 million tasks, but at the end of the day, there you are with a big shiny space shuttle sitting on a launchpad. That’s complicated. Complex challenges? Raising a child. Being married. Negotiating legislation. Running NATO. That’s complex.
• So yes – see above – you get to honestly claim the “complex challenge” badge if your situation has no solution, has no ‘end state’, and can never be ‘solved’. Those are the ones we’re interested in.
• And then we get to the chaotic challenges. Fire in a chemical factory. Accident at Fourth and Main. Baby in the well. Those are chaotic. Call 911 or other suitable first responders, get things under control, and then see what’s left.

And there you have it. When it’s messy, when it’s fraught, when it’s actually complex, and when it matters – passionately – to you personally, you need a strategic change advisor. And we know a couple of pretty good ones.