Our Clients

Here is a selection of clients who have benefited from working with us. Simply click on the icons under each logo to find out more.

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For access to all our case studies, please click on the image below.

The Client: Unilever is one of the world’s leading suppliers of fast moving consumer goods. They have three global divisions – Food, Healthcare and Personal Care and Sensei have been asked to work in all three, in all regions of the world.

The Work We Do: Many of the leaders in Unilever have chosen Sensei as a trusted business advisor, team coach and event facilitator over the last few years.

Our work with Unilever has mostly been helping leaders get the best from their people and injecting discipline and creativity into their team and leadership events and conferences. During our long relationship we have designed and deployed several ‘Leadership Journeys’ world-wide and these have helped their global category and regional leadership teams accelerate their journey towards high performance. We have also designed and facilitated several War Game sessions for many of their categories and we continue to coach and work with many of the regional leaders and global brand teams, helping them with their challenges and achievements.

Unilever use Sensei as a trusted advisor and experienced facilitator and executive coach for any challenge where they need to get a diverse set of participants quickly focused on a strategic task and working well together. Our ability to design and flex our approach and our challenging and engaging facilitation style works really well in their highly diverse, high performing operating environment.
The Client: Elizabeth Arden is a global beauty products company with an extensive portfolio of prestige fragrance, skin care and cosmetics brands.

The Challenge: Recover the reputation of the UK leadership team in the eyes of the corporate HQ. We were asked to help build a compelling vision and strategy for the UK business that aligns the requirements of the American parent with the belief and commitment of the UK leadership team. In the process we had to repair fractured relationships between the two leadership teams and build a collective confidence that the UK strategy will be delivered.

The Work We Did: We worked with the UK leadership team and the corporate HQ team through a number of coaching interventions and two highly impactful strategy workshops. Our support was focused on building confidence, injecting stretching challenge and building relationships between the corporate team and the UK leadership team.

The Outcomes: The UK leadership team developed a new vision and a strategic road map that satisfied the corporate HQ requirements and built the confidence of the corporate parent that the actions will be delivered. The strategy will enable the business to drive performance and deliver results in line with the corporate aspirations.
The Client: Reckitt Benckiser, RB, is a global force in household, health and personal care branded consumer goods. The company has sales of over £6 billion and consistently grows ahead of the industry due to its leading brands, its operations in over 60 countries, sales in over 180 and its highly motivated multinational leadership teams. RB is the world’s biggest manufacturer of household cleaning supplies and has managed to raise its sales and profit targets during the global recession, whereas their main rivals have either reduced them or scrapped them all together.

The Work We Do: Many of the leaders in RB have chosen Sensei as a trusted business advisor over the last few years. The RB operating culture is highly results focused with leaders from many different countries working long and hard to develop and grow existing brands into new markets and to develop new products to fuel the growth of trusted household and health and personal care brands in developed markets around the world.

Our work with RB has mostly been at the interface between their people and their processes, helping them get the best from both. We have also helped integrate new functional teams post acquisition of Boots Healthcare and helped their many multinational leadership teams accelerate the journey to high performance with suitable coaching interventions and leadership team workshops. In addition we have developed many tailored development programmes for various functions across RB and have brought several technical skills training topics to life, making them relevant and useful for their culturally diverse high potential managers.

For example, we designed and deployed a global team based project management workshop to support their best in class new product development process. One of RB’s key strategic weapons is their ability to turn ideas into goods on shelf in around 9 months, which is at least 3 months quicker than their nearest rivals. We are proud to say our innovative process work and training design in support of their new product development process has helped deliver this key strategic aim.

We have designed several Value for Time conferences and workshops for various functions including R&D, IT, Global & Regional Regulatory, Supply and Sales & Marketing. These conferences are always highly rated as we enable their managers and leaders to engage in the business challenges they face in a fun and innovative way.

RB use Sensei as a trusted advisor and experienced facilitator for any session where they need to get a diverse set of participants quickly focused on a strategic task and working well together. Our ability to design and flex our approach and our challenging and engaging facilitation style works really well in their highly results focused, high performing operating environment.
The Client: The Co-operative Group is a unique business democratically run by members to meet their common needs and aspirations. Now one of the largest multi-retail organisations in the UK, it spans a wide and varied range of businesses, from Retail Food Stores to Funeralcare, from Pharmacy to Farms, with Travelcare and Specialist Retail along the way. With over 110,000 employees and turnover in excess of £10billion it is an organisation to be reckoned with. People Services - with circa 160 staff - manages the whole employee lifecycle and is the HR Administration function responsible for delivering support to the Managers and Employees throughout the Group.

The Challenge: To transform People Services to enable them to deliver the support and service the employees and Managers throughout the Group require and expect in the face of acquisitions, shifting business priorities and significant organisational change. In the last 12 months the People Services team has had to deal with a 45% increase in employees to service, technology upgrades, embedding a new organisational structure and the delivery of consistently increasing standards of HR Admin support.

The Work We Are Doing: Our support has been, and continues to be, on a number of fronts. Ultimately we are improving the interaction and alignment within People Services and between them and their customers. Sensei has helped ensure that everybody is engaged with improving and delivering an excellent service. We have contributed to shaping the strategic agenda for People Services, acting as trusted advisor, facilitator and coach to the Senior Leadership team to ensure that their strategy is clear, well thought out and effectively executed. We have actively supported the change management activities associated with migrating over 55,000 new employees onto the Group payroll and support of People Services. This involved delivering hands-on, real-time change management and employee engagement support, whilst transferring skills and capability into the People Services team to ensure sustainability. We supported improving the relationships and alignment between People Services and the business HR community, using a process re-engineering approach that has dramatically improved the quality of the execution and service delivery.

The Outcomes: People Services have improved their delivery against SLAs month on month and successfully transitioned and paid an additional 55,000 employees in a 15 month timeframe whilst increasing staff engagement to the highest throughout the HR function.
The Client: Firmenich create perfumes and flavours for the world’s most desirable brands. Headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland, Firmenich is the largest family owned business in the global perfumery and flavour business. With a turnover of 2.9 billion Swiss francs and over 5,900 employees operating in 57 organisational entities worldwide, Firmenich is a world famous perfume and flavour house.

The Challenge: The newly appointed global head of marketing based in Geneva, Benedicte Foucart, had inherited a global marketing community that required a cohesive global marketing strategy. We were asked to help her create a global marketing strategy that would be appreciated by the key stakeholders in the business, re-position marketing as one of the key contributors to the success of the company and build commitment and a sense of one community within the global marketing leaders dispersed around the world.

The Work We Did: We provided coaching support to Benedicte and helped her understand what the key corporate stakeholders actually wanted from her function and what they felt they got now. We then ran a number of internal workshops with her own corporate team and their key internal stakeholder groups to explore the value inherent in the internal relationships and helped them produce a plan to ensure the corporate marketing team re-focused their energy and enthusiasm towards delivering services that were actually valued by the company.

We then used this work to design and deliver a global marketing conference in which the marketing leaders from around the world came to Geneva in order to build an effective global marketing community. Our innovative ‘Value for Time’ conference design injected new energy into this diverse group and the resulting strategy and implementation plans have helped re-establish ‘marketing’ as a key internal function.

The Outcomes: Marketing is now better appreciated and used as a key internal function in support of the Development and Sales functions. The energy created by the workshops was used to fuel a re-direction of support activity within the marketing function and new services are now much more valued by the key internal stakeholders.
The Client: Homeserve’s vision is to become the first place people turn to when considering fixing, maintaining and looking after their home. Homeserve provides home maintenance services to over 4.3 million households in the UK, France, Spain and the USA. With over 9 million policies and 4.3 million customers, the group has a worldwide turnover of c£517m and employs around 5,500 people. Their business model is to provide a wide range of third party services to a number of the world’s leading insurance companies, ensuring their customers get a world class property repair service when making a claim.

The Challenge: The corporate head of learning and development in the UK asked Sensei to design and deliver a series of training workshops in support of their management development programme. This development programme is aimed at the senior to middle management cadre and covers a range of topics designed to equip them with the people and leadership skills required to succeed in this very competitive and service-centric industry.

The Work We Are Doing: We have designed a highly innovative and experiential set of workshops aimed at delivering leadership, general management and enhanced customer services skills for their senior and middle managers in the Home and Property Repairs Division in the UK. The company is currently reacting to the ‘game changing’ recession in the UK by re-focusing their business onto the core services they provide. The resulting uncertainty this creates for everyone in the business – and for the ‘front line’ managers in particular - means that now more than ever they need leaders who can motivate and encourage people to perform despite the uncertainty of the world around them.

Our workshops will provide the skills to do this and a much needed confidence boost to the participants in what has been a very difficult and challenging year.
The Client: Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine, LSTM, is the world’s first institution dedicated to research and teaching in tropical medicine. Today they train more than 500 students from over 70 countries around the world. They have won over £130 million of research contracts from some of the world’s largest and most eminent grant makers. LSTM have 260 staff in the UK and attract new talent from around the world as they make progress towards their goal of becoming the premier European institution in tropical international health.

The Challenge: Dr Stephen Ward leads an international team of research scientists working on developing an Anti Malaria vaccine suitable for distribution in the developing world countries. The ‘AntiMal’ consortium is a complex integrated project comprising leading groups of malaria researchers with expertise in malaria biology, chemotherapy and drug development drawn from around the world. The aim of the programme is to exploit new scientific and political opportunities to secure the development of a portfolio of viable, novel, anti-malarial drugs.

This consortium is funded by the European Union and the key scientists and researchers have spent most of their professional careers in the academic world. Increasingly they are having to interface with the world’s leading pharmaceutical companies and as a consequence need to acquire commercial and project management skills to appear credible when viewed by leaders in these more commercially orientated and less academic organisations.

The Work We Are Doing: We have developed and run a number of workshops that introduced this highly eminent and academic group of international researchers to the expected behaviours and practise of the commercial pharmaceutical world.

The first workshop held in Nairobi, Kenya in 2008 covered the principles of team based project management and introduced the participants to the skills needed to work effectively in virtual teams.

The second workshop was in 2009 in Lausanne in Switzerland and focused on leadership and personal effectiveness skills. The professors, scientists and research students who attended left with a heightened sense of their own leadership style and the impact this style has on the people they need to influence. They also understood and more importantly had a chance to practise, how to modify their communication styles to suit the more commercially-centric world of the global pharmaceutical environment in which they increasingly have to compete and win.

The resulting increase in confidence and personal effectiveness will pay dividends in the future as the participants understand what it takes to effectively lead others and how best to interface with leaders in the commercial world.
VALUE FOR TIME CONFERENCES - A CLIENT'S PERSPECTIVE

Interview with Bob Woodburn, Global Supply Chain Director, Danone Medical

Q: Bob, you used Sensei to help you deliver a conference within Danone. What did you hope to get from that conference?

BW: We were a very young leadership team and supply chain community. We had been together for about 3-6 months. At the conference we had lots of new people from countries with a supply chain responsibility coming together for the first time. We also had people from different functions; we had people from factories, purchasing/sourcing and logistics and we wanted to create a sense of a single operations community.

Q: To what extent were those hopes and expectations met with the Sensei conference?

BW: I think the conference was a very important first step. Building a community is a journey. It’s not something that is created overnight but the conference was a great start, which we then built on with everyone who attended. It helped to set the tone of the community that we are trying to develop: in trying to communicate key messages around personal responsibility, about commitment, about being an interactive part of the whole team rather than simply someone who was passed instructions from on high and told to get on and do it. We wanted to create a community where people could contribute, add, as well as taking from the community; contribute, as well as be told what to do. So the conference was an important part of setting that scene, it set the tone for how we wanted that community to work in the future.

Q: As a participant at that conference did you find any of it particularly useful on a personal level?

BW: I was part of the team that co-designed the conference with Sensei. So the design was not a surprise to me; I knew what was coming. Nevertheless I really took away some quality conversations with people who I work with quite often, which gave me much bigger insight into who they were as people and what they were trying to achieve in their role and their personal aspirations. We created an environment where, over the course of the conference, people responded to the exercises we did and as a result developed a different quality of relationship, one that was deeper and more authentic.

Q: The business invested a fair bit of money flying people in for the conference and putting them up for two days in a nice venue. What do you think the business gained from the conference? How would you justify that investment in terms of time and money?

BW: At the end of the day we are doing this to achieve a result; and we have very clear cost objectives and service objectives as an operations community. In order to achieve those, we have to co-operate. We have to co-operate across functions, across countries, across technical areas. We had a very successful year and a lot of that came from our ability to operate as an integrated whole. Everyone had to understand what the priorities were and everyone had to understand what the business wanted to achieve.

Q: So would you say that the conference was good value for time - for the participants and for the leadership team?

BW: Yes, I think so. We only come together at most twice a year and in 2009 with all the budget constraints we will only be meeting once. The Sensei design, the format we used, meant we really got great ‘bang for our buck’. The conference was quite an intense experience yet people didn’t feel overloaded. They didn’t get swamped with information that they never use again. We had a clear process within the conference, which meant we delivered really impactful messages in a cost and time efficient way. I would say that we got great value for money and for time.

Q: It’s about a year since we did the conference. What’s different now from when we entered the conference this time last year?

BW: We are several steps further on our journey than we were last year. We can really see much better communication and an understanding between the different functions up and down the supply chain - operations, manufacturing as well as our people in the countries around the world. Basically what we created with the conference last year was a platform that we can now build on. We have our next conference coming up now, roughly a year after the previous one, and what we will be doing is trying to use this to push forward and to challenge ourselves to come up with a higher performing organisation. The conference last year gave us this opportunity.

Q: So you chose Sensei to help you design and facilitate the conference. How did you find working with us?

BW: The Sensei team were very easy to work with. This doesn’t mean that they just sat in the background. They are very active, participating and where appropriate leading the discussions we had, both from a design point of view and to challenge us to be clear on what is it that we are trying to achieve. They really helped us to actually understand precisely what it is that we were trying to do with the conference. Once we got our objectives agreed, they were very good at coming up with different ways of achieving these. In terms of conference design they helped us break things up and to do things in a different and engaging way. Their design ensured that people interacted and remained energised throughout. In particular they kept our people interested and energised. Everyone enjoyed the event and lots thought they wouldn’t before they came!
CIMA CIPD TECHNICAL UPDATE SEMINAR: STRATEGY, PARADIGM AND COWDUNG

Set out below are some of the comments made by seminar attendees:

“Delivery style fantastic – couldn’t be improved – held attention from start to finish.”

“Malcolm made a pretty boring subject interesting and with a sense of humour.”

“Exceeded expectations of the course due to high level of engagement.”

“Very well presented. Extremely refreshing and interactive.”

“Well focused and presented. Concise and good opportunity to get ‘time out’ and think about strategy!”

“Currently undertaking a business plan review, so helpful as an update and to focus the mind towards the whole strategic planning process.”

“Help with providing an approach and structure to making change.”

“Knowledge gained today will be used in our strategy days discussion to actually achieve a “real life” strategy for our organisation.”

”Help to provide tools to think differently and help others to think differently about their behaviours. “

”Inspired me to think and rediscover strategy.”

”Very motivational. Clear and simple and easily transferable into the workplace.”

“Trigger thinking and change within a 160 year old organisation facing major threats.”

“Recognise the importance of taking time out from operations to consider strategy.”

“Gave some good ideas as to how to challenge current thinking and develop a strategy.”

“Reiterates the importance of selling strategy to whole organisation. Encourages creative thinking.”

“Invaluable in clarifying how to set strategy.”

“Stimulates thinking ‘outside the box’. Interactive and interesting – well presented.”
INTERVIEW WITH MAX GOWLAND, GROUP TECHNICAL DIRECTOR, JEYES

Q: So you used Sensei last year for a piece of work. Can you tell us a little bit about what that piece of work was?

MG: Yes, in essence, when I joined Jeyes, I noticed there were huge differences in how the German and UK laboratories did their work and they were certainly not acting as one team. One of the first things I wanted to do was to bring Sensei in to help me build a new team and turn R&D into a genuine Group resource.

Q: So how did the work actually go? What did you get from it and how did you find working with Sensei?

MG: Well, the work went extremely well. The main objective of getting Sensei in was to reset our purpose as a team. I wanted all my team to understand strategically what we were supposed to do in conducting R&D at Jeyes. Easier said than done! One of the first things I wanted to clarify was, are we doing the right R&D and are we doing the R&D right? One is a strategic statement and the other is about the efficiency of R&D. I knew that Sensei would be able to add value by getting my team to ‘down tools’ for a couple of days and develop a plan as to what we should be doing and how we should be doing R&D.

Q: And did they do that?

MG: Yes they did, very successfully. I believe the two day workshop we had with Sensei was incredibly successful. Even though what we did in essence was a departmental get-together, with departmental objectives, it did actually end up having a much more multi-functional impact. Other departments got to hear of R&D going away and doing this exercise and became curious as to the outcome and as a consequence a lot more people in Jeyes now understand that R&D is not just there to develop products. We have various connections into other parts of the organisation, which, if managed correctly will give rise to significant benefits for the business overall.

Q: So what did you think the business got out of it – over and above the R&D team?

MG: I believe that the business now has a more effective R&D unit. I also believe that the people who went through the Sensei workshop have had the time to reflect and think very carefully about not only what R&D should be doing in the organisation, but also what role they should be playing as individuals within the R&D unit.

Q: So would you recommend Sensei to any of your business contacts and colleagues? And - if so - why?

MG: Yes, I certainly would recommend Sensei. I think they did an excellent job. In my opinion they are a very pragmatic organisation and the Sensei character is one of challenge and fun. I think Sensei have been incredibly successful in getting people to take a day or two out, think outside the box and do things differently.
TWO CASE STUDIES FOR AVON & SOMERSET CONSTABULARY

Case Study 1:

The Client: Avon and Somerset Constabulary is one of the country’s larger police forces with a total staff of over 6000 and an annual spend of more than £280 million. It faces the same tough challenges as every other police force in the country: delivering a consistently better service without an infinitely increasing budget.

The Challenge: To build internal change capability that enables the delivery of significant organisational change over the next 2 – 3 years. The constabulary is working in partnership with local councils and IBM to transform the way it delivers improved services to the citizens of Avon & Somerset. Traditionally not an organisation that has “managed change” particularly well, ASC needs to deliver the transformation successfully and leverage the benefits. To do this well will require a more robust approach to managing change and change expertise in the heart of the organisation.

The Work We Did: We worked with the Organisational Development Team, whose responsibilities include providing support for efficient change management within the organisation. We helped build a single method for managing change and coached and supported the Change Managers throughout the organisation as they learned to work with it. We guided the delivery of a change management plan that supported the implementation of the first waves of organisational change. We also built sustainable capability in the organisation through effective knowledge transfer, which means that the change team is now successfully managing and evolving its approach to the new change challenges the organisation faces.

The Results: ASC benefited from the successful management of key stakeholders and the delivery of appropriate training and communications in order to manage a very difficult initial deployment of SAP for c3000 users. They are now successfully delivering phase 2 of the organisational change and are in the process of rolling out the next SAP modules.

Case Study 2:

The Challenge: Like many other organisations, ASC is going through organisational change and long-established teams and departments are having to review the way they work and the value they bring to the organisation. For at least two departments within the constabulary this meant that the focus, direction and contribution were slightly out of kilter with the requirements of the force.

The Work We Did: Unfortunately, as in so many organisations, teams are constantly trapped by the operational “hamster wheel” and the vital first step was to create the space to jump off the wheel and think about the future. We worked with both departments in a very similar way: designing and facilitating Away Days to support the departments in creating a compelling vision and a strategic plan that would enable them to rise to the challenges the organisation is placing upon them. We worked with the teams to ensure that all their staff were fully aligned behind what the department had to deliver, whilst facilitating, coaching and challenging them to ensure that everyone’s voice was heard and everyone made a contribution. Our engaging style, careful design and supportive facilitation meant that, in each case, enormous value was derived from the minimum investment of time and effort. It is amazing what a team can achieve when given the right space, direction and support.

The Results: Both departments now have a more strategic relationship and are acting as “trusted advisors” to the Chief Officer Group on the appropriate matters. Staff morale and job satisfaction have improved significantly.
The Client: Bettys has an enviable reputation for warm Yorkshire hospitality, traditional service and high quality teas, coffees and cakes delivered from their five outlets across North Yorkshire.

The Challenge: Bettys is part of Taylors of Harrogate, a food group with a forward thinking executive team who recognise that to stay ahead and continue to grow their business they will need to focus all of their teams on providing outstanding and spectacular customer service in all of their branches.

The Work We Did: To help understand what it takes to provide outstanding and spectacular service levels, Bettys executive team asked Sensei to design and deliver a highly innovative customer service workshop. This workshop was designed in the spring of 2009 and was deployed across all the retail teams throughout the company during the summer months.

The workshop catered for participants of all ages and experience, from the senior managers at each branch through the departmental and team leader hierarchy to the part time students who worked at weekends only. We designed the workshop to be highly engaging and participative with lots of dialogue, problem solving and external service benchmarking through shopping experiences.

Purpose: To understand what it will take to deliver spectacular levels of customer service that will drive customer loyalty and endorsement.

The Outcomes:

• Understand Bettys customer service vision and take ownership for its delivery
•  Develop ideas and actions to ensure we can deliver this vision
•  Recognise the role every one of us can play in driving changes at all levels in the organisation
•  Get some energy for the journey ahead

We delivered these workshops to all Bettys personnel and they have been very well received, generating great energy and lots of ideas on how to improve still further the exceptional service Bettys provides to all of its customers.

PARTICIPANTS' TESTIMONIALS:

Sarah Graham-Harrison, Front of House Manager, Bettys Harrogate

Q: What did you want to get out of today, what were your expectations as you entered the workshop?

SGH: I don’t think I had any because I came in not really knowing what we were going to cover. The company called it ‘spark up the magic’, but that’s all we have been given as a brief so I didn’t really have a preconceived idea of what I was going to get out of it apart from maybe the opportunity to spend time with other branches, which we don’t normally do.

Q: Were your expectations met?

SGH: Although I did not have any expectations, I felt that what we did today was really worthwhile and valuable. So, yes, I thought it was a good workshop and definitely good value for time. It’s about taking what you have done during the day and using it and not just boxing it off and forgetting what you have done.

Stuart Morris, Catering Manager, Bettys Harlow Carr

Q: What did you want to get out of today, what were your expectations as you entered the workshop?

SM: What I wanted to achieve was to improve my level of customer service and discover what I could do as a back of house department to improve the service we provide to the customer and to each of the individual departments we serve. I expected a well motivated and energised day with some activities and some tasks designed to get us out of the chair and just do some things we don’t normally do.

Q: Were your expectations met?

SM: They were met. As expected it was revitalising. It made me think about things I wouldn’t normally do. It is nice to get out of the branch environment, it makes you appreciate the things we do a bit more.

Q: What was your personal highlight from today?

SM: One of the highlights of today was the things that other companies do with their mission statement, our service vision has been changed and it was great to see what we intend to provide.

Q: What will you do differently tomorrow?

SM: Tomorrow I will be planning my day better. I will give more time to my junior managers so they can convey back to me from the floor the peace of mind that everything is running smoothly and correct.

Carol Hanson, Front of House Manager, Bettys York

Q: What did you want to get out of this workshop and what were your expectations?

CH: Today I came with an open mind. We’ve got to open our minds up to different ideas and different concepts. It’s good to get a bit more re-energised, a couple of different ideas and a bit of a re-focus on what we’re are doing well and what we can improve.

Q: Were your expectations met?

CH: I’ve come away with some really valid pointers on what we can do differently. I always find that the simplest ideas are the most effective so just some tiny little points could have a big impact on my management team, because what I really want to do is to empower them to do their job to take the pressure off me so I can take us to the next step. So that’s really where I see myself and what I wanted to achieve from this workshop.

Q: What was your personal highlight from today?

CH: I think one of the points that I found most useful was actually going out and experiencing customer service and realising the different customer perceptions that exist and you realising you can’t ever afford to get service wrong.

Q: Was it a good day for you and was it good value for time?

CH: It was. It’s always very difficult leaving the branch, especially on a Monday! There is always a list of jobs to do and you always think ‘Oh God, we have a big target to hit today and I really should be in the branch making sure all that happens.’ However when I took time out to really get myself a little bit more organised, committing ideas to paper, looking at my team from afar and just spending a little bit more time thinking I realise I can do these days quite easily with not actually having to worry so much about the branch. I think that these days make our managers' lives a little bit more interesting. It’s what I have the power to do. I just need to do it.

I need to do the planning and not the work as such. I need to be less ‘hands on’ because my managers are more than capable. I realise that I just need to step back from day to day activity a little more...
CLIENT TESTIMONIAL – DAVID PARR, CEO

Q: So David, what organisational challenge triggered you to consider working with Sensei?

DP: We’ve just completed a very comprehensive efficiency programme, which resulted in our organisation downsizing its workforce and changing the way its workforce operated. So what we needed was to talk to some people who understood organisational change and how we might develop our organisation in its new format.

Q: And how has Sensei helped you and your Senior Leadership team?

DP: We wanted a different perspective on leadership, really. We’ve worked with a number of organisations and Sensei provided a different perspective. They brought a private sector perspective into the work that we were doing as a local authority. And that gave a different dimension and a different thought process and enabled us to think a little bit more cleverly about the work we’ve done historically and how we might improve going forward.

Q: And what outcomes did Sensei deliver for you?

DP: What we have been able to do is to re-energise the thinking of the senior managers and leadership within the organisation and brought some new and different thinking into the way we operate. Obviously, as a public sector organisation, there are certain rules and regulations that we have to abide by, but we still run a multi-million pound business and we are still very, very interested in doing that as efficiently and effectively as we possibly can. So, what Sensei were able to do, was to bring the experience that they’ve created over a number of years from some very large multi-national companies and we’ve been able to build on that learning and they’ve been able to share that learning with us, so that we can think in a more modern and a less traditional way about how we lead our organisation.

Q: So, how did you find working with Sensei?

DP: It was very interesting! It took a little time for us to understand each others’ world, I think, in the first instance. But that was good, because that challenged a number of paradigms, it challenged a number of norms – both within Sensei, I think, and within the local authority. And that stimulated a lot of debate, a lot of interest, a lot of thought process and it’s enabled us to develop a new way of thinking, a new way of doing business. So, it’s been a very positive experience and one that we’d certainly recommend to others.

Q: David, you’ve had a lot of experience when it comes to working with consultants. What, do you think, makes Sensei different from other consultancies you have worked with?

DP: I think the most important thing when working with consultants is understanding what product you’re looking for in the first instance. So, we took a little time in understanding each others’ business and the way that the two organisations thought and if and when we can gel together. From initial discussions, there was an immediate chemistry, I think, between what we were looking for and what Sensei could provide. And when we developed that further into the developing of the programme of work, it was clear that Sensei had an understanding of what we are about as a local authority and equally an understanding of leadership in its very widest sense. And that really brought some added value to them as a partner to work with us because the way we approach our consultancies is that we are looking for partnership. There has to be a two-way exercise and Sensei were able to work with us in partnership, understanding our business and helping us to develop our business further.

Q: Would you recommend Sensei to your fellow Chief Executives in other local authorities – and if so, what would you say to them?

DP: I think we would recommend Sensei. I think anybody going into a new relationship would have to understand the basis of that relationship and it wouldn’t be a traditional arrangement, it would be something that local government would have to move out of some of their comfort zones to work with Sensei. But I think that’s really positive. It’s been positive for us, because we’ve been forced out of our comfort zones by a number of external factors and Sensei have helped us to develop new ways of thinking, new ways or operating and sometimes you get better outcomes if you move out of your comfort zones. And Sensei have helped us to do that and have been supportive in what we’ve been trying to do.
The Client: Seven Seas is a division of Merck KGaA, the German Pharmaceutical and Chemicals company, and the UK’s leading provider of vitamin and mineral supplements. This position was reached by manufacturing a range of vitamins and supplements for a wide range of consumers around the world.

The Challenge: The leadership team wanted an innovative way to inject new energy and impetus into their product development pipeline in order to get new innovative products to take to the trade and boost sales. The Apollo 15 project was born with the brief to launch at least 10 new products in the next 9 months. A 15 person cross functional team was formed and they had less than 3 weeks to form, focus and develop ideas worthy of consideration by the senior leadership team and ultimately the trade.

The Work We Did: We worked with the Head of Research & Development and the core Apollo 15 team, co-creating a workshop designed to get the Project off to an explosive start. We took the team to High Trenhouse, our preferred strategic retreat high in the Yorkshire Dales, and over an evening and a day, using Sensei Idea generation tools and techniques, the team generated over 180 ideas and concepts. We helped the team quickly filter these into the top 20 and then paired the team up to develop the concepts into more detailed new product ideas. The pairs then had a week to prepare their ideas for a ‘Dragons Den’ style pitch to members of the Senior Leadership Team. This was highly successful with 17 ideas good enough to survive the ‘Dragons Den’ session.

These ideas are now being fast tracked through the product development process and many will be presented to the trade within 6 to 9 months.

New thinking turned into great new product ideas in less than 2 weeks – a real success!