CLIENT RELATIONSHIPSWe take Gandhi's axiom seriously. For us, this starts with our client relationships.
We partner with our clients in a meaningful way, not just as the ‘experts who know best’. We don’t think of ourselves as consultants but as coaches, collaborators, and co-learners. This approach creates better outcomes. It’s also a better way to work.
10 working principles :
01. Co-creation: By partnering, this means co-creating the engagement with our clients, aligning the best methods with real needs. As partners, we provide expertise in foresight methods and their application; our clients provide knowledge and know-how about their organization or problem, culture, and context. Our assumption is that our clients have more knowledge and resources than they know— as leaders and within their organizations. Part of our job is to help reveal this intelligence and wisdom.
02. Open dialogue: Success depends on openness, transparency and trust in our client relationships. Collaborating closely, we’re in continual dialogue about what is and isn’t working. We also feel it’s our duty to help clients see for themselves the hard realities ahead, confront blind spots, and overcome denial and complacency—key barriers to good foresight. This often requires some difficult truth telling, which we handle with confidentiality and compassion. In addition, we’re not afraid to walk away from a project if we discover that this, or other conditions for success, no longer hold. Not surprisingly, our clients joke that our role lies somewhere between being an existential therapist and a court jester.
03. Whole person approach: Good foresight requires multiple intelligences—equal parts head (analysis), heart (emotions and values), gut and spirit (instincts, will, courage). To adapt to external change, leaders need to adjust their mental map and mindset, and develop new skills for coping with uncertainty and ambiguity. This is why we engage with our clients holistically: we work not just with their professional selves, but aim to engage with them as full human beings committed to a better future. Many clients find this a refreshing way to work, with often life-changing results. The fringe benefit? Our clients become friends, colleagues, and valuable members of our network. As Kevin Kelly once said, “whoever has the smartest customers wins.” We’re not really sure what that means, but we like the sound of it!
04. Whole system approach: Good foresight happens when we widen our lens and situate ourselves in the whole system in which we live. This helps us “get of the box” in a more rigorous way, enabling us to better sense of our emerging future and understand the systems dynamics, especially since the vectors of change almost always come from the “outside-in” (and why we’re often surprised by them). So during our projects we often explore topics and perspectives that seem peripheral or less relevant to the organization’s core interests, but in fact represent critical drivers of change. Some clients resist this at first, since many leaders are so focused on short-term issues. But most participants end up enjoying this opportunity to learn more broadly, systemically, and connect the dots across important trends affecting their organization.
05. Flexibility & Tolerance for Ambiguity: Strategic foresight projects are often moving targets. Conditions change, both within and outside of the organization. So we need to be flexible, adapting the process as new insights emerge in ways that best serve the project objectives. In addition, foresight projects are special: because the future is inherently uncertain, not every outcome can be clearly defined in advance. The usual “plan, predict, and control” model for problem solving doesn’t really apply here. While we are expert guides, clients will not always know where the process is heading, which is in turn part of the learning: for being able to tolerate ambiguity is a key skill for managing future complexity. Clients should also expect the unexpected. These may be unanticipated outcomes (often the most important), or pushback from participants who feel out of their comfort zone (which is often a good sign we are doing our job). Novel thinking rarely happens easily!
06. Learning-by-doing: We have learned that enduring change comes when leaders arrive at their own conclusions and solutions, and when their teams feel they are participants in this process. Enduring change also comes when we create new capabilities for our clients, not dependencies. Regardless of the project type, we always aim to build new capabilities in our clients’ leadership abilities. This is why our projects are highly participatory and take a learning-by-doing approach. This is especially important for foresight methods, which often need to be experienced to be fully understood.
07. Respecting dignity and differences: As part of our methodology, we expose our clients to people with divergent views, different cultures, and contexts. As a condition for working together, we make sure that our clients understand the concept of respecting the dignity of others. This is harder than it sounds; we’re often unaware of how we diminish the dignity of others, especially since many clients come from positions of privilege and power. Practically speaking, these status differences can prevent clients from seeing new perspectives and communicating with people in the field, and thus becoming a barrier to strategic insight and innovation. For this reason, we spend time teaching dialogue and deep listening skills, and, for learning journeys, ethnography techniques and cross-cultural competencies.
08. Shared responsibility for outcomes: Adaptive Edge is responsible for the design and delivery of processes that create the best possible “container” for insights to emerge. Of course it’s up to our clients and the participants in the process to fill this container. As much as we might try, we can’t make leaders learn or change if they don’t want to. What we can do, however, is “contract” with participants to take shared responsibility of their learning and outcomes, according to principles and measures they define themselves. Meanwhile, the project leader on the client side has a special job as well: they must champion the process, encourage maximum buy-in, manage political dynamics, and ensure there are enough resources to implement the outcomes of the project. Without this leadership and team buy-in from our clients, we can’t successfully do our job.
09. Serious Play: We think the best insights happen when we’re energized and feeling creative, when we’re having fun and in flow— that peak state of mind when we’re feeling most present and generative. So wherever it makes sense, we include moments of “serious play,” which also counterbalance the more cerebral and challenging aspects of futures thinking. By “serious play” we don’t mean superficial exercises but established techniques used by leading innovation experts, designers and creatives. In fact, as a principle, we believe there is much to learn from artists, many of who are expert and creative performers in rapidly uncertain contexts.
10. Reflection spaces: Most leaders live a hectic life and suffer from chronic information overload. In our projects, we carve out “white space” time. These are moments of reflection and sense making, where new insights can emerge, where leaders can “extract the signal from the noise” in their lives. To paraphrase a Zen proverb, we help leaders slow down to go further and faster. Though a struggle at first, most clients embrace this opportunity to reflect and see the bigger picture.
CLIENT RELATIONSHIPS
