Improving governance in Honduras, creating a better environment for small and medium-sized companies in India, creating an world-wide alliance of central bankers to enable the financial inclusion of the poorest and most needy, greening commercial bond markets or creating and disseminating best practice amongst emerging market multinational companies – just some of the challenges the world faces in trying to achieve a sustainable and fair world that can rise to the challenges of the 21st Century as it unfolds.Working in international cooperation situations does not just require inter-cultural and linguistic qualifications, but rather demands a whole new way of working. It is not possible to import wholesale the techniques and tools of commercial management consultancy, for the hierarchical glue provided by classical organisations is just not present.

The challenges of international cooperation are so large and complex (sustainable societal change) that no one organisation can deliver it. This means that coalitions of actors (individuals, organisations from the governmental, civil society as well as the private sector), networks and political systems must come together in a way that allows such a diverse group to move together towards consensus on issues of crucial importance to the future of the country, region and indeed world.

The role of the Frankfurt corporate development group is to support these societal projects as they lay the groundwork for the future, help them find and implement strategies acceptable to all, and assist them in the definition and maintenance of project structures and processes that enable the future to take place.

Our consultancy focus includes:

• Project Evaluation and Feasibility Studies – assessing the viability or the success of project approaches
• Consultancy and Support in Project Implementation – capacity assessment and capacity development strategies, strategy development and implementation, monitoring and evaluation, project and personal coaching, support for the operationalisation of Capacity WORKS
• Training – senior management development, strategy and Capacity WORKS training, project and personal coaching
• Concept and Methodology Development – major contributions to the development of the GIZ’s Capacity WORKS, Capacity Assessment, long and short-term training courses and modules as well as development of academic concepts.

Sectors in which we have worked in the last five years include:

• International sector and global projects
• Health
• Governance, Democracy and Decentralisation
• Regional Organisations (Mekong River Commission, Africa Union, ASEAN, IGAD, SADC)
• Private Sector (including SME and SMME)
• Financial Sector Development
• Rule of Law and Criminal Justice
• Natural Resources
• Education and TVET
• Trade Development
• Climate and Energy

Regions in which we work:

• World-Wide networks and project approaches
• South and South East Asia – India, Pakistan, Vietnam, China, Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand, Malaysia, Cambodia and Laos
• Africa and the Middle East – the Palestinian Territories, Iran, Qatar, Egypt, Botswana, South Africa, Ethiopia, Djibouti, Tanzania
• Europe – Germany, Turkey, UK, Albania, Bulgaria, Russia
• Latin America – Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, Guatemala, Nicaragua and El Salvador

Why are agile organizations in the lead?

In the future, digitilization, e-commerce, social media and the Internet of Things IoT will even accelerate the pace of change towards more VUCA. Thus, the central question is, how companies, leadership and staff can find their unique way to remain responsive and capable of still adding value – without resorting to trivialization and over-simplistic answers.

The decisive difference among agile companies in the digital age will be their respective speed, flexibility and customer-orientation on staff and leadership level alike to respond to customer dynamics and needs

The term “agility” describes the overall processes, structures and core competencies of companies to stay in the game under VUCA-conditions

What makes an organization truly agile?

An agile company is truly customer-centric and oriented totally towards the market. Everything that happens within agile companies is derived from customer expectations and added value to customer experiences. Competence in agility is then measured as the speed and versatility with which an organization is able to respond to customer needs in uncertain, volatile, and complex market situations.

Competitive advantages that come from agility are, among others:

•    higher team autonomy to respond to and interact with customers
•    increasing expertise by co-creation with customers and permeable customer-company relations
•    higher flexibility by small loops and iterations instead of long and stiff process chains
•    better team spirit by delegation of authority
•    quicker feedback and learning curves
•    higher loyalty of teams due to a culture of trust, responsibility, and commitment.

Get to know your company’s specific challenges toward agility

Agile Transformations are always conceptualized from the customers’ perspective and the organization’s peripheral sphere, where customer value and relation are created. By this, agilization starts with the teams at the company’s periphery, not the center. Agile transformations are the opposite of centralized, top-down change projects.

“Agile organizations are functional when two principles are in good accord: Focus on the outside customers and markets and equally focus on the internal structure by which all staff can orientate itself on all levels towards the clients’ needs” (Gloger, Margetich: Scrum, 2014:17).

To counter and meet the challenges of the increasingly VUCA worlds around us, agility seems to be the most plausible, usable, and practical answer. Yet, Scrum or SAFe methods by themselves will not lead to more reliable certainty. Beyond methods and tools, it is the organizational capability to deal with persistent uncertainty intelligently. True agility is the ability and freedom to act meaningfully under extremely uncertain and volatile market conditions.

Therefore, agility is an internal mental and emotional concept of readiness to give up on certainty.

In agile worlds, staff and teams act as self-organized and fully self-responsible units—they become the true center of solutions and success. Leadership changes its role from captain to servant leader, dealing with impediments to seamless processes. Leadership provides purpose and orientation, not command or control.

Thus, leadership focuses on the three “F”: facts, fear, and force, and moves towards the three “R”: Relate (build stable relations), Repeat (learn), and Reframe (foster new thinking).

How do we support your agile transformation?

Most start-ups and IT-companies are already based on digital business models. Our consulting services focus rather on classic or analog companies that haven been successful in the past with traditional functional line organization models. These companies are becoming increasingly under market pressure in VUCA-conditions. We focus on their transformations from old to new work, from functional to agile teams and from line control towrds empowered organizational peripheries.

Our role as transformation consultants is primarily balancing and dynamically re-calibrating the organization between certainty and uncertainty on their transition towards agility. We support you in finding stable and reliable communications as the backbone to effeectiveness in circumstances of constituitive uncertainty.

Communicative competence in highly volatile, complex and uncertain conditions is the key to inner agility and a pre-condition to any outer agile method or framework.

Design and co-realization of agile transformations

We jointly create with your experts a locial step-wise approach ón different organizational levels based on your specific answers to the question of “Why do we want to transform into agility?”

During the realization, we go “all the way” with you and your organization, i.e. supporting individuals, teams and units to cope and master their challenges towrds true agility in a VUCA-world.

When clients come to us their needs and challenges as individual and unique as them and their organisations. Organisations and their environments are unique in their potential and the challenges they pose.

One common factor in all this is, however, the complexity that forbids trivial strategies and received wisdom.

Clients seek our help when they:

• need to develop new organisations and business models and implement reorganisation processes.
• wish to strengthen entreprenuerial thinking and behaviour on all ölevels of management.
• need to develop new strategies and anchor them in their organisations.
• want to initiate the next steps on the way to becoming an agile organisation.
• want to optimise their business processes, or,
• want to build energetic transformation processes.

Common to all these transformation processes is that organisations are confronted with contradictions and dilemmas. For us, these contradictions and dilemmas are ‘growth pains’ on the way to developing the new and not unnecessary irritations that prevent organisations from reaching their goals.

 „Conflict is growth trying to happen“ (Harville Hendrix)

Support on the Way into the Unknown

We develop together with you your individual change architecture that improves the probability of the acceptance of change and reflects the complexity of the undertaking.

Our concept of Change Management combines the craft of instruments and formats with a systemic understanding of organisations as well as the ability to shape socially dynamic processes. Such processes are ignored at their peril as they provide explosive material that has derailed many change processes in the past.

Effective interventions in this area as part of a deliberate change architecture provide room for negotiation and discussion as well as decision-making that support leadership through personal as well as collective growth.

The integration of leadership development and organisational development is one of the core competences of the frankfurt corporate development group.Successful change in organisations is directly proportionate to the ability of management to involve teams and other stakeholders in the change process and develop their ability to lead and manage themselves. The development of this conscious ability of self-management is one of the most difficult challenges for management in changing environments.

Agility and flexibility can only succeed when managers adequately balance out these two factors as well as their abilities within them. Only in this way can managers set free the essential resources required for change – energy and responsibility. This is agile leadership in a nutshell.

Only in this triangular concept can one sustainably change leadership as well as leaders. These three elements in their interplay are the basis for our work and the cornerstones of all change management processes.Our attention in such processes is not therefore primarily on the leader as such but on the whole leadership system.

After a thorough analysis of the current situation we develop together with our clients individual and tailor-made solutions for their needs. We aim here for the common ground generated by horizontal learning in peer-groups and vertical learning in the dialogue of different leadership levels in an organisation with each other.

Formats of Leadership Development

Depending on the specific challenges and their complexity facing each company, we have been able to develop different learning designs over the course of our work in last fifteen years. In these formats leaders learn to take increasing responsibility for developing themselves their content and form.These formats range, depending on the specific situation of the organisation and its development needs, from strongly theory-oriented on the one hand to experiential on the other. The combination of these two approaches allows the development of an individual and tailor-made landscape of learning which caters both to the individuals and their needs as well as the organisation.

Depending on the Challenge, we develop together with our clients individual packages that allow for sustainable leadership development and learning

Especially when leaders have to act in volatile markets and decision-making situations where responsibility and entrepreneurialism are demanded, they need to learn like intrapreneurs, producing and manging their own learning processes.

We have supported over 20 firms in the last 15 years in their change and leadership development processes. Here we have developed and implemented leadership programmes across the whole organisation. As certified group dynamics coaches and systemic consultants we utilise the here-and-now dynamic inherent in such programmes for experiential learning. This learning has three essential aspects: Skills and abilities, perception and sensibility, attitude and values. Learning about leadership is not cheap, but delivers value for money.

Some examples of Leadership Development from our Experience:

• Leadership Development All 4 D´s – all leaders of in international chemical and biotechnology company worked at their leadership performance and culture in order to master the challenges of a globalised market.
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• Leadership 2020 – leaders in a lighting firm learn to react to the challenges posed by the paradigm shift to LED technology.
• Leaders Lab: from consumers to producers of learning. Managers in a German diocese learn to manage their own leadership development process on the way to becoming vicars in large congregations.
• “Bewildering Diversity: leaders consult leaders” leaders from four separate global companies help each other in leadership questions.
• “micro-politics: leading in the game of power” a group dynamic training for leaders needing to develop competence the fields of classical leadership, horizontal leadership and leadership bottom-up.
• “Leadership days in the cloister” managers develop answers to life and work questions in a monastic setting.
• “Profile and Impact” a group dynamic training for managers wanting to improve their impact in group situations.
• “The manager as Coach” developing responsibility and results.

We also support leadership development by:

• Management audits, diagnoses of potential on the basis of strategies (…the original makes no sense to me, see below)
• Ma­nage­men­tau­dits, Po­ten­tial­dia­gno­sen und -analysen, basierend auf den Stra­te­gi­en
• the creation of measurement and management tools for leadership development.
• the development of leadership guidelines
• the introduction of staff talks and goal-setting systems
• Team development and leadership teams
• Team development and virtual teams
• continual development of the Board of Directors through coaching

For the following issues we offer in-house training and seminars:

• development of leadership personalities
• leadership in turbulent times
• Leading Change: Chan­ge-Ma­nage­ment for managers
• Team­ coa­ching
• Management Coaching
• Leadership workshop

We also work in the field of personality diagnosis and use tried and trusted models and instruments such as MBTI, Golden Profiler of Per­so­na­li­ty, The Profiler or the Belbin model.

Closing the deal is a milestone in any merger, but the quality of the subsequent integration defines success. The realization of the added value inherent in the agreement depends on the constructive and active cooperation of the staff in this phase.

Achieving integration goals is a challenge complicated by various merger-specific factors. Managers and staff need to actively manage the integration project for which they are often ill-prepared while ensuring that the day-to-day business continues.

This requires a specific merger competence, which in turn requires competent and professional management of complexity in intransparent situations through a clearly structured project management approach that combines change management with professional management of the organisation’s structure.

We support companies in professional merger consultancy with in-house seminars to help them achieve their merger targets despite the inherent turbulence and develop their merger-management competence as a skill.

Planning with the “Integration Diamond”

Using our integration diamond, we help our clients develop specific and individual integration strategies.

The integrated use of all six integration fields helps to develop a complete integration strategy that is capable of being implemented through the corresponding project management structures and change architecture.

This development of a practical strategy represents the high art of managing permanent ambivalences and contradictions inherent in such a process. Typical examples here include:

• The desire to achieve a quick integration in order to be able to concentrate on the say-to-day business again contradicts the need for a thorough, step-by-step and time-consuming integration process.
• The need to provide quick answers both within the organisation as well as externally can lead to statements that are not sustainable and need to be revised.
• The desire to leave things as they are for each side to know the other better sits uneasily with legal and statutory requirements.
• The diversity and independence of many operational areas and their desire for unity and standards contradict the idea of cultural diversity.
• The achievement of savings and synergies promised during the deal stage contradicts the need to get to know things better and to concentrate on innovation and customer needs.
• The challenge of developing a reliable complete planning concept contrasts with the fact that much information is only available after the deal has been done.

The heart of our post-merger integration consultancy is the early concentration on the specific integration challenges and their strategic resolution through realistic and practical activities.

PMI excellence – an overview

Frankfurter Gruppe uses an integrated PMI methodology and supports your integration project hands-on throughout its duration, including review and lessons learned.

Blue print

• An individually designed and adapted blueprint allsows for steering and controlling across the project scope and – equally – it deeply structures and guides the vertical wokstreams

Project organization and controlling

• Setup of a stable and lean project organization that enhances a meaningful dialogue between the various actors and roles within and aside the project as well as a effectful and precise tracking and controlling.

Change Architektur

Post-merger integration projects are a demanding and complex subset of change projects. They need an intelligent change architecture and practical implementation steps to fully realize the potential of the deal's expected value drivers

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Cultural Integration

• Our extensive experience over 10-20 years of partner-level consulting in integration and change projects gives us ürofessionalism and confidence in approaching issues in the context of cultural integration in adequate and well-considered formats.

Leadership

• Leadership needs specific support before and during the integration: We prepare, coach, qualify and support leaders to be guides and points of orientiation for staff in times of change and complexity.

Learning organization

Mergers tend to fail. Only those who learn and gain competence will achieve professionalism in integration work. We actively transfer knowledge and insights and support you as a truly learning organization.

Success factors

Our services in merger integration projects

Central functions for PMI planning, steering and controlling

• Project Management and Co-Lead to internal PM
• Project Management Office
• Project Integration Communications

Companies constantly face the challenge of permanent changes in processes and structures as a reaction to changes in markets, competition, and technology. To avoid losing performance momentum, it is crucial for the organisation to react properly to the permanent pressure for change to secure its future.

There is no one-size-fits-all structure for an organisation. Its permanent struggle is to find the right structure for the moment and the best and most efficient processes that fit.

Two factors are especially relevant here: the right tools for the adjustment and designing processes to increase the acceptance of such changes within the organisation. This alone is sufficient reason to plan reorganisation carefully and ensure capacities for its implementation before embarking on such a journey.

How we support our clients during reorganisation

During reorganisation, we are there for our clients throughout the duration of the journey, especially during turbulent and challenging times such as the start and the difficult process of developing new structures. We support them in their development until they become robust and productive in their new form.

• how do we ensure that change energy can come arise?
• Which issues and themes are important for the staff here and how can we organise successful communication channels about the change?
• How ready are managers and their staff for the proposed change?
• What is the difference between leading change and leading on a day-to-day basis?
• When should I communicate what to my team? When are large-group events appropriate?
• How can I organise an effective change project that can absorb and assimilate the organisation's diverse reactions to change and respond intelligently to them?
• How can I time the reorganization? What needs to be accelerated and what needs more time? What is mandatory and what is desirable?