Our holistic approach maintains focus on the client’s big-picture, long-term objectives — while never losing sight of essential details, critical dependencies, and real-world constraints. This approach maximizes desired outcomes while minimizing unintended consequences, especially when applied consistently across the varying situations and circumstances in which organizations, groups, and individuals find themselves.
That approach includes services that can be categorized as:
Preventive services
Genuine health, happiness, and productivity are best maintained by ongoing cultivation of inherent wellness, not by episodic imposition of external remediation. Such a wellness lifestyle includes periodic, preventive check-ups (even in the absence of troubling symptoms) as well as being intentional in healthy eating and exercise.
We at SCS believe this to be true not just personally, but also interpersonally and organizationally. Our typical “wellness” services include:
- Auditing (informal or formal) verifies that important principles, policies, and procedures are documented, understood, and followed consistently — because the absence of such can lead to unforeseen, unintended, even counterproductive consequences.
- Appreciative assessment focuses on identifying, celebrating, reinforcing, and building upon what is already working well.
- Failure Mode and Effects Analysis (FMEA) searches for potential failures in a product, process, or system; then analyzes them for their causes and repercussions; and finally identifies and prioritizes preventive action based upon severity, likelihood of occurrence, and detectability — all before such failures occur, to improve reliability, safety, and customer satisfaction.
- Equipping consists of programs that present, explain, demonstrate, and cultivate new mindsets, toolsets, and skillsets to individuals and to groups, to strengthen their ability to deal effectively and confidently with a variety of situations. We offer introductory overviews, half and full-day workshops, and week-long boot camps; these can be remote/virtual, onsite, or offsite. Popular topics include:
- Understanding the nature and management of complexity, especially in organizations
- Continuous learning, continuous improvement, and “qualitative quality” as cultural values
- Why transformational change is often more important — and more difficult — than incremental change
Facilitative services
Facilitation involves a neutral third party, the facilitator, who works alongside individuals and groups to improve their problem-solving, decision-making, planning, and communication, typically around a specific task or deliverable over a defined period of time.
Facilitators do not take sides or make decisions; instead, they manage the process, focus discussion, encourage participation, foster collaboration, and promote productive group dynamics. When so requested, facilitators can monitor the proceedings to ensure that all relevant stakeholders are present, especially those closest to a situation with the most direct subject-matter expertise. Facilitators can also detect — and work to correct — when people are “talking past one another” or otherwise “not on the same page.”
Facilitation is often useful for these types of activities, either stand-alone or in combination:
- Expressing, exploring, and engaging disappointment — unaddressed disappointment can become corrosive, even explosive; but respectfully, thoughtfully managed disappointment can reveal issues before they cause substantial damage and when they’re more easily resolved
- Strategic planning — periodic revisitation of where an individual or organization wants to go and how to get there; often includes SWOT analysis, SMART objectives, and systems thinking
- Converging divergent perspectives — before determining how to get from “here” to “there”, there must be consensus on “here” and “there”; divergent perspectives should be approached as complements, not as competitors or contradictions; and their convergence should be a process of synthesis, not compromise
- Managing change — assessing, analyzing, designing, preparing, implementing, and monitoring intentional change; working to ensure that “the right change is made, and the change is made right”
Remedial services
Fresh perspective and interdisciplinary expertise from outside assistance can help to resolve occasional situations of greater persistence, severity, or potential risk, while fully respecting and leveraging the subject-matter expertise already in place.
Root-cause & correction analysis — comprehensive problem-solving that first alleviates the symptoms, then finds and fixes the immediately underlying issues, then further seeks to identify and remediate the foundational issues that allow, precipitate, protect, and resurrect such problems — thereby identifying and correcting root causes, so problems “stay solved” with minimal unintended side-effects
Mediation — assists individuals or groups in active dispute over a particular situation, by helping them to move beyond conflict or impasse into genuine resolution and mutually acceptable agreement. The mediator, a neutral third party: promotes productive communication, dialog and negotiation; helps to clarify viewpoints and issues; may offer suggestions but doesn’t impose decisions; and encourages each party to hear, to acknowledge, and to respect that which is important to the other parties. Such a process can also cultivate or restore productive, collegial, collaborative relationships between the parties, beyond agreement on a specific issue.
Embedded consulting — working with an individual or within an organization over an extended period of time, to assist in the investigation, understanding, and addressing of particularly important issues, threats, or opportunities