Everyone is discussing agility, Industry 4.0 and New Work. What does “Movendo has always worked like this” mean?

While a few years ago our systemic way of working still seemed to require explanation and was sometimes stylized as a question of faith in disputes, today many of the basic systemic convictions seem to be legitimized and even trendy. It is as if Movendo has become agile and follows the maxims of New Work. But what if we could show today that Movendo has always worked this way – in other words, that it is “traditionally agile”? We have already published many examples of our systemic consulting work. I would therefore like to take this opportunity to give you an insight into the inner workings of Movendo Consulting. At the same time, I would like to thank Simon Sinek and Frederic Laloux, on behalf of many other authors, for giving us a language for what we successfully practice internally with their publications. Inspired by Sinek’s Golden Circle, we have summarized our Movendo Why under the claim “ComplexityRules – MovendoSpotlights”. Firstly, this conveys our conviction that complexity is the defining characteristic of today’s world. Secondly, Movendo’s services, in the form of spotlights, shed light on how to deal with this complexity and thus enable a more targeted approach. In this way, we are – hopefully – helping to make, if not the world, then at least some work contexts better. Our Why gives us the orientation to determine the current and future direction of Movendo Consulting. In doing so, we have also closed a gap that had been affecting us for several years: the fact that we had not committed to a strategy for at least 4 years. Our experience with defining our corporate strategy has always been that it lasted for around 4 weeks. After that, the framework conditions changed to such an extent that the strategy no longer matched reality. Of course, this can be attributed to our inadequate ability to anticipate the future and thus develop more viable strategies. At the same time, we realized that we are closer to assessing our company’s development if we subject it to a monthly – sometimes even weekly – reflection loop to ask ourselves where we will focus our resources next and which topics we will not pursue. In the context of the evolutionary sense of an organization described by Frederic Laloux, this approach helps us to focus on the organization’s intuition and find out where Movendo Consulting wants to develop as an organization instead of relying on predictions. Of course, the internal exchange with all members of the organization is of great importance in order to find out the voices and moods within the organization. As an organization, Movendo Consulting consists of both a team of permanent employees and a very large community of freelance project partners. Accordingly, our internal orientation also aims to create a framework for the Movendo community in which every single colleague wants to make an active and attractive contribution. According to Laloux, this includes both the areas of “self-management” and “wholeness”, both of which we are very concerned about. In concrete terms, this means that we have replaced the fear that a freelance project partner could “snatch” a client away from us with transparent and trusting cooperation on an equal footing. In terms of project work, there are no differences between permanent employees and freelance project partners; instead, decisions are made jointly in project teams with the involvement of experts and stakeholders. By maintaining constant contact with our customers and, above all, by constantly mirroring developments internally, we are able to create a team atmosphere that is conducive to deployment, both among consultants and in the area of administration and support functions. The unfiltered feedback from our clients and the constant reference of our own actions to ongoing projects and their effectiveness help us to focus our team performance. We can and want to continue to develop as an organization, particularly in the area of “wholeness”. This includes, for example, the decision to replace annual meetings with a joint reflection walk to clarify where the consultant’s and management’s attention will be focused in the near future. We are also creating more internal feedback events in order to strengthen our exchange and continue to develop as an organization, especially together. Of course, we also use methods such as agile project management and Scrum. Not because they are “hip”, but because they have already become established in our attitude and practice. Our team meetings are monthly sprints in which realistic goals are agreed. Incidentally, this has been the case since a team meeting in the year Movendo Consulting was founded, when we agreed in a group dynamic euphoria on a Friday to work out certain results by Monday. When we realized what a ridiculous time frame we had agreed on, it became our principle to pay even more attention to the feasibility of all agreements. This is why deadlines and resources at Movendo are constantly negotiated and agreed internally and adjusted at any time if necessary. In the recent past, we have had extremely positive experiences with giving our community more control over internal issues. I would like to briefly outline two particular examples here. Firstly, as managing directors, we saw the urgent need to adapt the remuneration model for our permanent consultants to current developments. To this end, we did not design a model first, but asked our consultants – guided by a few principles – to develop their new remuneration model themselves. In addition to the fact that we now have a very transparent and simple remuneration model, all the contradictions that we had initially seen with different models have also been resolved. For us, this is impressive proof of how much the promotion of multi-brain thinking leads to better solutions. This in turn strengthens our confidence in the solution potential and the willingness of our employees to find solutions. We had an even more intense experience last year when we called together more than 30 of our consultants for the first Movendo Community Day. We are still working on the results of this day today because they impressed, enriched and surprised us in so many ways. In addition to a fantastic strengthening of our mutual relationships, we received a multitude of impulses that affect our business in a concrete and prospective way as well as actively shaping our internal community development through more diverse exchange. Among other things, we now have regular community dinners, a virtual community get-together and our internal community software, which helps to provide constant insight into our globally distributed projects. The main result of this community day for us is to trust in the potential of our community in order to come up with solutions that we had not previously thought of. All this experience strengthens our conviction that we have not only found an effective answer to the challenges of a complex, networked world in our attitude, but that we can also use our own experience of internal practice to authentically support our customers in overcoming the same challenges. And this is not because it is a New Work trend, but because Movendo has always worked in this way and continues to develop with enthusiasm.