Many companies have tried to steer change on their own, only to find that the road is much bumpier than anticipated. More than 80% of our engagements started after previous attempts had burned out key players and resources. That’s when we step in, providing the expertise that often eludes internal teams. One of the most common pitfalls is overburdening line managers with change management responsibilities. These managers are excellent at handling day-to-day operations, but the skills required for steering a change initiative are entirely different. The expertise needed includes not only a deep understanding of change management methodologies but also the capacity to guide a team through the inevitable turbulence of transformation. When change is treated as an afterthought – managed by individuals without the proper tools or experience – the result is often a failure. Traditional command-and-control methods may work in routine business scenarios, but they fall short when creativity and flexibility are crucial. The consequences? Projects that miss their targets, prolonged timelines, and an unsettled workforce.

A European private equity company is planning to invest in medium-sized companies with high growth potential and a strong market position. At the same time, it is important that the target company has a significantly high share of international value creation in order to be able to flexibly compensate for locational disadvantages in Germany and to be able to dynamically realize integration into global value chains. The aim is to identify companies that are both financially sound and strategically well positioned to generate long-term value creation. Another important criterion is to use the succession plan of the target company for professionalization. In order to make well-founded investment decisions, a project is to be carried out to evaluate the business plans of medium-sized companies.

Since 2016, the share of industrial automation technology and digitization in our reorganization and transformation projects has increased constantly as key elements. Especially the project work with Brazilian startups then additionally sharpened the knowledge of digitalization and solidly opened the view for the B2C sector.

What was and is more and more our core assumption, our guiding principle? No consumer is or will be 100% online. And no consumer will be 100% offline anymore. We need to be where the customer explicitly wants to shop. We believe that the multi-channel market is the best focus for our customers' business model.

It is about making the hidden necessities and wishes of our client's users and customers visible with the models to be tested quickly. In short: Find inspiration - develop LowFi solution model - validate application with customers.

In any case, it sounds like digital transformation and is therefore indispensable in our post-modern world of work and projects. Very often, process mining is also mentioned in connection with Big Data. But is that necessarily the case? Just because process mining is very often mentioned in connection with Big Data, a lot of people, especially smaller and medium-sized companies, already shy away from it. We have a long experience with the working method, which is called Process Mining. Let's take a closer look at this topic and demystify these "brave new words".

So what are the options for small and medium-sized companies whose budget does not leave room for extensive external consulting?

In most cases, the evaluation ends positively and then led directly to the decision to invest in the deployment of the identified technology.

In Brazil, a reorganization is the optimization of fiscal, managerial or organizational conditions within a company. Turnaround is part of restructuring and not reorganization or transformation. This distinction is generally valid in Brazil and is based on the delimitations of the North American economic area. This may sometimes sound confusing with regard to the German-speaking economic area, since in this region there is usually no real distinction between reorganization and restructuring.

Sometimes radical change is needed. Companies are subject to dynamic change and this also affects management. The art of leadership, especially in reorganization and restructuring phases, lies in not just looking at a small window of time. Whether growth, crisis or restructuring - no phase is permanent, not even if the right things are done at the right moment.

In this article, however, we will look at the issue from a more fundamental perspective.

We have been applying the Design Thinking mindset for many years, evaluating with every project. We see again and again that Design Thinking is probably one of the most important aspects on the path of corporate cultural change in a transformation. Therefore, we come to the project with the evolutionary knowledge of Design Thinking and implement this way of thinking. It should take root and stay in the project and in the client company.

Contextual intelligence - using Brazil as an example. What is Brazil's profiling and thus the implications for your business in the country? Brazil vs. India - a vivid example of how important it is to decipher and interpret cultural and contextual intelligence.

We, our clients' employees, and employees of companies we know tend to spend between 3.5 and 4 days per month in meetings and video conferences (strategy meetings, coordination meetings, conference calls, video calls). This corresponds to about 20% of the effective working time per month. Most meetings are mostly just a rehash of things we all actually already knew. To achieve an efficiency effect we had to change the workflow in the new project missions. So if it should be true that a lot of meetings are just a rehash of long known things, this coordination should be replaced by asynchronous updates and tasks. And this is where collaboration tools come into their own.