Why FACTUAL Consulting?

I have been asked by friends and colleagues why I decided to establish and build FACTUAL Consulting.  I’m very fortunate to be in a position to be able to build an organization to focus on what I see as perhaps the largest risk involved with scaling lean-agile value delivery in a digital business. That risk being, leadership too often forgets that it is a ‘Human System’ that delivers the value and that the ecosystem that they work in is the foundation of all the other subsystems that come together to deliver the value.

FACTUAL Consulting will provide a community-based reference framework that will be the basis of assessments, tooling, leadership training and coaching. This portfolio of services is designed to enable the cultivation and maintenance of ecosystems in which knowledge workers innovate, design, build, and deliver the value that enterprises provide in this age of digital business to their customers, employees, and stakeholders.  The ecosystem should also provide a balance that truly enables the promise of Lean, continuous learning and improvement.

Over the last ten years of working at helping organizations scale lean and agile approaches to value delivery, I have found that scaling efforts are most often impeded by leadership, most engaging at levels that are far too tactical. The scope of the “system” in the concept of systems thinking in the ‘Lean school of thought’ is far too narrow.

Imagine a farmer not paying any attention to the ecosystem in which they want to plant their crop, rather just knowing they want to produce a crop. They buy equipment and seed, hire people to plant the crop, and hope for the best. That approach in farming doesn’t yield predictable results, and the same can be said for the approach many leaders in digital businesses take in creating and cultivating the ecosystems needed for knowledge workers to deliver the ‘planned crops’ at scale in their enterprises.

FACTUAL Consulting was founded to formalize and bring to market the FACTUAL Framework which has been developed to address the key risk we see affecting the successful scaling of the Lean-Agile Mindset to enterprise scale, that being a knowledge-worker ecosystem not conducive to the Lean-Agile Mindset.

FACTUAL is a framework for leadership at all levels to understand the state of their current knowledge worker ecosystem, how to cultivate it into a highly fertile one, and maintain that ecosystem through the one truly consistent element of business and life, that being change.

In my next post, I will introduce the FACTUAL framework in more detail.