Organizational Renewal

Helix Group is an educational consultancy specializing in Organizational Renewal, Strategic Culture Change, and Building Knowledge-Creating Communities. We serve organizations that need their workforce and their culture to adapt and grow and learn. We help build enterprises that depend upon new knowledge to thrive. Ours is a dual bottom line approach to culture formation where financial return is co-equal with employee development. A balanced approach to organization transformation achieves financial results while reinforcing the company’s purpose and values. We help discover the essence of each company we serve and to assist them lay a new and deep set of cultural roots that preserves this essence while undergoing cultural and strategic transformation. A company’s Operating Philosophy is a key to its knowledge-creation process, and its value proposition.

Organizations routinely need to go through a renewal process in order to stay competitive. In fact, in order to achieve or sustain world-class performance, at times it may be necessary to dramatically reshape the direction of the company and often the organization’s culture must lead the change rather than slowing it down.

Direction change requires the synergy of individual and organization growth. With significant value proposition change come changes of equal magnitude in leadership development.  Such transformation can be daunting since these efforts usually require changing deeply ingrained habits and assumptions held by the entire workforce. Often these leadership shifts entail adopting new mindsets and challenging tightly held assumptions.  Whether a company has 100 employees or 10,000, planning culture change can be daunting – it requires a systematic organizational renewal framework.

At Helix, we use the metaphor of organizational design to describe how we plan. We help executive teams develop a framework or blue print for social change. We build executive and planning councils that act as learning communities capable of envisioning and leading complex change.

The companies we have supported have all needed to re-invent themselves while they keep their existing business operating. When poorly planned, large scale change that entails discovering new knowledge under a deadline can trigger cultural defense routines—habits that inhibit openness to new learning. The Helix Strategic Culture Change process entails identifying and maturing beyond cultural defenses.  We help organizational communities to create their future rather than reacting to it. Our method is based on a “dual bottom line approach,” which means that we design our renewal plans to treat financial return and human development as co-equal objectives. Most of our clients find the method so effective that they incorporate the dual bottom line as part of their long-term operating philosophy.

By the nature of the problems involved, aspects of the plan are always unknown and un-knowable—they have to be discovered. Knowledge creating cultures are intrinsically filled with uncertainty. This can be unnerving for executives who have spent their careers providing answers. We characteristically find that executive teams need support to embrace, rather than drive out, ambiguity and uncertainty. They need new forms of leadership (which we call Stage IV Leadership), leadership strategies that embrace ambiguity, and commitment to a strategic direction. We help organizations face into and master the human dynamics of change.

Excellent performance follows naturally from the cultivation of high levels of human development. Our methods rest on the knowledge that humans are hard wired for greatness. Organizations have yet to be designed to cultivate and release this intrinsic human blueprint. We help design organizations to cultivate and rely on higher levels of human functioning intrinsic to individuals and communities. We cultivate organizational cultures so they include transformative adult education methods rather than training. We build critical thinking, emotional intelligence, and communal systematic problem solving. We teach organizations to move beyond management by control to management through education. This results in a motivated and aligned workforce capable of critical thinking.

We are experts in the psychology of optimum performance. We help cultures identify their ego development needs and we introduce them to the higher aspects of human development that are less well known, but critically needed for knowledge-creation.

Public companies require systems of internal control that “trust but verify” performance, but knowledge-creating companies place primary emphasis on the promise and practice of development. Dual bottom line companies can’t promise employment, but they do promise development, which is the genesis of organizational knowledge-creation.

In our experience, fundamental large-scale culture change that enables shifts in business direction requires coordinated social action. The whole organization needs to respond in unison through “collective intelligence.” We apply principles and practices from the little-known field of Transpersonal Psychology to build the company as a knowledge-creating community. Our approach is communal by design. We treat culture as a social asset that needs to be renewed for high performance.

Our method is based on a Four Stage Development Model. We have identified the “simplicity that underlies the complexity” of development. By keeping the process simple we can help companies direct their own development rather than relying upon outside experts to reach their workforce. These Four Stages of development we have named: Undisciplined, Conventional, Self-Actualizing, and Self-Renewing.

We take the organization up the ladder of development step by step. Every organization has a mixture of high and low development. Our change process is driven by an analysis of the company’s strategic objectives. We ask what is missing in their development to perform at the desired level. After assessing where the company falls on the ladder of development, we assemble the executive team to begin a process of designing the organization’s renewal plans.