Building healthy, high-performing teams
Together we innovate your way of working in order to
delight customers,
AND
boost operational effectiveness & efficiency,
AND
cultivate a rich environment where employees can thrive.
Are you consciously designing & improving your systems & processes?
Great (team) work doesn’t just happen. It’s purposefully crafted.
To keep your business in the lead it is essential, to simultaneously enhance (i) value creation, (ii) productivity, and (iii) well-being. However, achieving such balance is hard – really hard.
By leveraging proven best practices and principles from Agile, Lean, Six Sigma, BPM, Design Thinking, and Sociocracy, we co-create tailor-made solutions that align with your unique DNA. We focus on your most pressing challenges first, delivering results in a very short time.
Just as Google Maps guides you to your destination, Ithaki helps you choose & navigate the path to business and operational excellence.
Mapping out the direction may not always be easy, but we strive to make the journey as simple & enjoyable as possible. The best solutions are often those that seem elegant, effortless & obvious in retrospect.
Let’s co-create a pragmatic, actionable plan that provides clear guidance for your team, ensuring everyone contributes to exceptional results. This structured approach not only reduces stress associated with unclarity & uncertainty, it also reduces work pressure avoiding the need for long hours. Furthermore, it empowers your team to leverage their strengths, fostering a sense of pride & happiness.
We help you to transform from fire fighter to leader. You will feel more in control. You will have a bigger impact. And most importantly, you will have more energy for your personal life —whether that means spending time with family, socialising, engaging in sports, or enjoying a good book during your free time.
Productivity & well-being reinforce each other
Ever felt like
- You have been very busy – hardly having me-time – and still feel you achieved little?
- You are pushing on your team to get things done?
- You spend too much of your precious time in inefficient meetings?
- You are struggling to get all the required administration completed correctly & timely?
- You are dragged into firefighting, unable to take a step back and reflect about the future?
- Projects tend to be out of control? They run over budget and behind schedule.
- Customers are complaining about poor quality & late/wrong deliveries?
- Your job has become a duty rather than a vocation?
What if
- Your organisation could enrich the world through balancing profitability AND well-being of its employees?
- Your organisation would be a magnet for talent & has very little staff turnover because people love to work.
- You & your team would return home full of positive energy after a productive day of work?
- Innovative ideas & opportunities for improvement arise abundantly?
- Administration was simple?
- You could deliver double digit growth / improvements year on year?
- You & your team could be more your authentic self in your work environment?
- Together we could make many people a little happier?
A master key for happy profit does not exist
Every organisation is unique, every individual is unique, every problem is unique. The combination is evermore unique.
In business, failing of an organisation has many common treats. Succeeding on the other hand can be done in a million different ways.
Ithaki wants to be your companion along your journey by sharing experiences. Together, we can establish a unique approach to your unique & daunting challenges. We can maximise results by tapping into a very broad set of experiences. Ithaki offers to:
- inspire you about your destination (purpose, mission & vision, values, aspirations, …)
- help you discover the best road (roadmap, technologies, frameworks, …)
- support you overcoming obstacles (e.g. quality issues, reliability issues, throughput limitations)
- listen as a sounding board, walking along the road
- guide you off the beaten track if you have the courage (innovation)
- connect heart (emotional energy) & brain (rational thinking)
- map out a strategy to thrive in this complex (“VUCA”) world.
In 5, 6 & 7 lies the true strength and uniqueness of Ithaki. Today’s world requires a multi-faceted approach to deal with the complex challenges around us. Additionally, people expect organisations to deliver both profit, purpose AND well-being of its employees.
Ithaki will support you on your journey through coaching, consulting, training or co-creating. Whatever feels right.
Harvest results along the journey
Not only do we believe in a tailored approach, depending on your unique needs. We also believe it is possible – even desirable – to harvest results very early in the journey.
Let’s take a simple example. An HR team wants to improve a specific process.
- Simply by declaring the objective and the fact that people are encouraged to take initiative for small improvements, will already create a dynamic that people indeed will come up with small improvements, without the project having truly started
- When the team describes the ‘as-is situation’, that already provides clarification and some AHA-moments, which fixes some inconsistencies, with the process being redesigned.
- As a next step, the team formally works towards a ‘future state’. That future state requires some software modifications, for which budget is required. Not waiting for the budget, the team already implements some improvements that can be done without the change of the IT system.
- Finally, the project team implements the software changes, creating another leap in productivity.
“Deliver more frequently in smaller increments” is a core principle of “Agile”. Unfortunately, many believe “Agile” equals “Scrum” and can only be applied in IT. That couldn’t be more wrong. If you believe you can, there is low hanging fruit in this area.
Harvesting results along the way implies a mind shift from
“We will submit a project and after approval, we expect we will deliver the project in 18 months. As of then, we can report the savings.”
To
“Let’s see how we can achieve results by taking a more holistic approach, including both quick wins and game changing investments.”
It will surprise you how many extra opportunities the team will see, and how fast you can harvest results if you adopt such a mindset.
What you need depends on where you are
As a team or organisation, you go through some maturity stages. What will have the most effect will depend on where you are.
- Ground some basics
- Get your processes to the next level
- Improve the human dynamics
- Innovate
Let’s explore that a little deeper.
You might lack some basis in your organisation: people might not know how to create a project charter, a process flow or function description. Don’t feel ashamed. It would surprise you how many large multinationals are struggling as well. It takes less than a day to get started working on actual problems. That is much better than an intensive course of a week, containing too much theory and too much information to use in the short term.
When the basics are in place, you might feel you reached a plateau. That is quite normal too: the devil and the delight are in the details of the execution. Having an external point of view often creates an Aha! moment.
Despite your great intentions, if your people don’t get it, results will lack behind. Getting people along is not that hard: if they feel truly listened to and appreciated, they normally go the extra mile. Everyone likes change, if one believes in a net positive outcome. So let’s look for win-win situations. At first, that might look like distributing the pie differently. Soon you will discover you are actually growing the pie.
No matter the solution, if in hindsight it seems too simple, it is probably the right solution. If complex, challenge it.
Rebel ideas drive progress
The biggest gains come from challenging assumptions and looking at apparent paradoxes. For example, you could improve the facilitation of meetings by implementing processes and agreements. However, the reason almost any organisation has too many meetings has a totally different origin. Or, you might train everyone in project management and still figure out none of the projects are delivered on time on budget.
Keep in touch to get omnifarious, atypical, unconventional, at-first-sight bizarre, paradoxical tips, tricks & insights around:
- Getting more done in less time.
- Different / atypical perspective on how work could be organised and organisations could work.
- Simple actions that will get your team more engaged.
- Why what you have been taught or told is not working that well.
- Achieving more.
- Smarter ways of working.
- Creating more time to fully live your life
- Reducing stress at work & replacing it with happiness
- Creating more ‘connection’ with your colleagues or manager
- Becoming more innovative
- …
These tips, tricks & insights are based on best practices, experience & research.
Ithaki, here we come
My name is Maarten Van Elsen (1980). I am a coach, consultant, facilitator & trainer in operational excellence with an emphasis on human excellence. I love to read about, to challenge, to discuss, to learn, to test, … better ways to get work done simpler, better, faster. People are not lemons to be squeezed, rather pearls to be found.
Expertise
Seasoned professional with expertise in continuous improvement (Lean, Six Sigma AND Agile), strategy, culture, process management, project management, family management, juggling multiple priorities, …
About Ithaki
Ithaki (or Ithaka or Ithaca) is the home town of King Odesseus. After having fought 10 years in the Trojan war, he heads home. Along the way, he needs to deal with several challenges, while his wife and son are waiting. When he finally returns (10 years after leaving Troy), he concludes the journey is as important as the destination.
Partnerships
We want to be a trusted partner. With pleasure & pride, we join forces with other great entrepreneurs who share a similar purpose & similar values. We don’t divide the cake. We make it bigger, offering even greater value for you.
Join the journey & enjoy the ride.