Using intuitive intelligence

Here's the situation: one of the maisons, one of the 'houses' of the world-leading French luxury group asked us to work for them, because they saw much opportunity for growth in the Asia-Pacific region that they decided to open regional headquarters in Hong Kong. All heads of countries in Japan, Korea, China, Singapore, Indonesia, and so on, were now reporting locally rather than to the Paris corporate office. As an immediate consequence, they now had indirect access to resources, especially product supplies, a key success factor in a high-demand market like China, for instance. Not to mention diminished relationships with key executives including the global president, the head of international markets, the head of HR, or the head of finance.

The challenge that we had to help the company face was for the country leaders to see this change as an opportunity, both for the business and for their careers. Because the business objective was about a mindset shift, it was clear that we couldn't force anything or anyone into adopting the new organization that the CEO had decided to put in place. Coercion might have worked in the short term, but never enabled a powerful APAC leadership team. We had to offer an experience for participants to realize that there was another way to engage with the process of change, a way other than force and control. Our goal was that they would gain a lot more of this way than the conventional way of doing business, built on goal-setting, on strategy and a roadmap. We decided that we would open up the process to much more spontaneity, improvisation, and let them come together and tell us what was going on with them, in this particular time of important change for them. We interviewed everybody, before getting into the room with the entire team. The president and the global head of HR were clear about their vision of where they wished to get to: a dynamic team of co-ownership of APAC business, along with a mindset of shared leadership, that's what they wanted. We were retained to help facilitate this shift (as The Human Company), this shift in leadership mindset and team dynamics, and to offer new techniques and tools for team collaboration, this was the agenda. We were given the opportunity to work with the team of country managers over three days in London, that's how it all started. A recommendation from the get-go was to leave the process relatively open of how to get to this vision, and to offer a process of emergence to give birth to this new dynamic, rather than trying to force anything. We offered the president and the global head of HR a path that would take the participants away from their logical mind (prone to seek control due to negative anticipations), and lead them, on the contrary, to embrace empathy for themselves as they were going through a process of change, coming with its own challenges, obviously. Thirdly, we invited them to be open to their innate intuitive intelligence, 'i2Q', in order to navigate the complexity of this transition, and open up to new and unknown possibilities. It all started in London, but prior to London we asked them to answer our online assessment to identify their strengths and opportunities individually, and more importantly, as a team, to help them build on their strengths and be more aware of potential pitfalls. We interviewed all participants one-by-one to get to know them, introduce ourselves, and ask them about their expectations in terms of objectives and deliverables for these three days. This two-tier process enabled us to share, with the participants, data that bring objectivity to the conversation, and help focus on their specific objectives, and we did a gap analysis. We looked at the difference between the desired state, and where we had 'photographed' them through our qualitative interviews, and the quantitative survey through our digital assessment tool.