Our Approach
Organisational change, transformation initiatives, and strategic collaborations often face significant challenges, with over 70% failing to meet key objectives. This leads to wasted time, resources, and missed opportunities. That’s where we come in.
Our approach tackles these challenges head-on by helping diverse groups - from small teams to thousands of stakeholders - move from differing perspectives to clear agreement and coordinated action. This alignment is critical for the success of initiatives like operational improvements, AI and automation, organisational restructuring, growth strategies, cultural transformations, leadership development, and more.
Grounded in research on Action Science, Interdependent Decision-Making, and Relational Networks, our methodology takes a fresh approach to collaboration. By understanding the dynamics of how groups work together, we help organisations dramatically improve their ability to achieve shared goals.
At its core it’s about creating alignment through clear communication, a shared understanding, and a focus on outcomes. Our system ensures teams prioritise the most critical issues, resolve conflicts, and turn differing opinions into actionable agreements. Whether it’s aligning on ROI optimisation, growth strategies, remote work approaches, or digital transformation, we empower groups to come together around a common purpose.
What sets us apart?
Speed: We crush conventional collaboration timescales, from 6-12 months to 6 weeks end-to-end.
Flexibility: Our virtual capability is ideal for office-based, hybrid or remote teams.
Efficiency: We use less of your internal resources than conventional collaboration methods.
Scalability: We provide for any size group and number of business challenges.
Consistency: We provide a common and repeatable collaboration meta-process.
Here’s how we do it:
Define the Case for Action: Establish a single, endorsed and validated message for the need to deliver change.
Data Driven: Use augmented intelligence to drive goal setting and decision-making.
Set Clear Goals: Identify measurable objectives and key performance indicators.
Prioritise Actions: Create a detailed plan with clear responsibilities and timelines.
Alignment Check: Conduct regular reviews to ensure teams make the necessary adjustments to stay on track.
Clients and Testimonials
Director, The Rialto Consultancy
Director, The Rialto Consultancy
Director, The Rialto Consultancy
"I have used the Strategic Collaboration approach multiple times and have been thoroughly impressed by its efficiency and the exceptional results achieved.
It has been a genuine pleasure working with George and the dedicated CHRS team."
Managing Director, X-PM Asia
Director, The Rialto Consultancy
Director, The Rialto Consultancy
"I just wanted to take a moment to express how pleased we are here at X-PM/BPG with the project you undertook for us using Schellingpoint and collaboration methodology.
The entire process, from start to finish, was executed to perfection, and the data we gathered is critical to our plans for 2025. The team was particularly impressed with the output at each stage, especially the sheer volume of valuable comments collected during the exercise.
The team are all highly experienced and seasoned in problem-solving workshops, noted that they had never seen such a wealth of important data gathered in any traditional workshop.
We will certainly be using this process again in the future, and we look forward to the possibility of using it with some of our clients as well.
Thanks again, George, for delivering such a professional and well-executed project."
HR Director, Pepper Money
"In early 2020, it became clear that COVID-19 would completely transform our world, transcending personal, societal, and work perspectives. Like many traditionally office-based organisations, Pepper Money had implemented emergency measures to redeploy colleagues to work from home. Recognising that surviving in a COVID-19 world would probably have a profound effect on how we would operate going forward, we spun-up an organisational development change programme using traditional methodologies including, a management led steering group, staff questionnaires and working parties. But this was taking too long, and we were having difficulty getting the full engagement of our now highly dispersed workforce.
As HR Director, I recognised that we could only move forward once we had balanced the needs of everyone concerned and had found solutions that worked for all colleagues. It became clear that prior to crystalising any new ways of working we would need to garner the views, hopes and concerns of our colleagues.
Given the circumstances, we needed to work at pace, and we needed to find solutions that would be supported by our colleagues. Crucially, we needed to protect our 'people first' employer brand in order to retain the best people to get us through these difficult times. The big question in my mind was - how could we make everyone feel comfortable, safe, and motivated to propel the business forward in a rapidly changing world?
Fortunately, I had been working with Rialto Consulting who had partnered with George Mystkowski of CHRS, the collaboration specialists. Using specially designed Strategic Collaboration software they set out how we could create and adjust plans for change while measuring, maximising, and maintaining alignment to any proposed new methods and ways of working. We agreed a 6-week programme which would yield an aligned and detailed action plan.
The first step was to determine what needed to change. To do this, we needed to ask the 'right' questions of our colleagues. George was brilliant at guiding me and the steering group at Pepper to construct the topic themes and specific question sets. The 'end-to-end' process of engaging with colleagues was completed virtually and without the need for F2F meetings, surveys, focus groups or workshops, thereby meeting all the Covid-19 social distancing restrictions in force at that time.
The outputs were revealing and, whilst we were doing well in many respects, colleague sentiments clearly demonstrated a number of areas needed to change in order for them to give their best performance. As we stepped through the engagement process, colleague alignment increased to circa 74% and at this point we were able to construct the detailed Roadmap.
Within the 6-week timeframe, the project had achieved its objective of aligning views across the workforce and producing a detailed Roadmap with nine distinct swimlanes of activity that would help us change the way we worked.
Having set ourselves ambitious growth plans, we identified that how colleagues would deliver our vision of being, 'the most trusted specialist lender in the UK', would be critical to the success and sustainability of the business. We needed a single harmonising cultural framework that colleagues could identify with and support. Armed with the outputs of the CHRS Roadmap, we were able to construct an entirely new cultural framework setting out how the business should operate.
The new framework, called the 'Pepper Way', provides guidance on how colleagues work together to deliver Pepper Money's vision and purpose. It defines how the cultural principles, conduct and behaviour are aligned to create the right working environment, and it makes it clear what is expected of colleagues working at Pepper Money. Pulling all of this together during the pandemic in very turbulent and uncertain times was a significant challenged for me and the HR team. This was only made possible by partnering with George and his colleagues at CHRS and consequently, I am very pleased to endorse the work, advise and expertise they provided."