The Vortex in organizations
Faire de l’incertitude un levier
de la pensée stratégique
Can we still run an organization the way we did ten years ago?
In the face of instability, it’s tempting to adopt a reactive posture, surfing on events to adapt from day to day. This strategy quickly becomes untenable: it exhausts teams and weakens vision. An in-depth rethink of the way the organization is run is imperative.
The Vortex was designed to achieve this mutation.
It offers an approach that reconciles vision and action. It overcomes the limitations of management by objectives. It motivates teams by enabling them to embody strategies rather than be subjected to them.
Why use the Vortex?
Le Vortex supports companies that want to think in the long term as well as in the short term.
It is aimed at several types of strategic situations:
Building a living strategic plan
Consider strategy as the expression of a collective’s intention in a given context, and not as “the right trajectory”.
in uncertain times
Think differently about reality, accept the subjective part of reality and use it to regain cohesion.
Anticipate
breakdowns
Replace the probability of scenarios with their criticality, and decide your destiny rather than suffer the future.
How does the Vortex work?
Depending on the issues, a Vortex approach takes between 1 and 6 days, which can be broken down into 3-hour sequences.
Each sequence calls for critical thinking, creativity and systemic analysis.
The accumulation of explorations leads to extremely powerful awareness on the part of participants of what the company needs to do, what it can do and what it wants to do.
The Vortex can be used by company leaders, but it is also an opportunity to set up cross-functional strategic task forces (made up of employees from different professions and hierarchical levels). Its ability to give power to the collective makes it a particularly well-suited tool for revitalizing organizations.
At the end of the process, a creative emergence process gives life to a strong, shared intention. This intention is embodied in each participant. That’s why it can be mobilized immediately.
Example of use cases
Breakthrough strategy
A training company faced with the impact of AI on its business (falling prices, loss of reference points, destabilized customers) mobilized 15 employees to define a market outlook. The Vortex enabled them to draw up a 5-year strategic plan, refocused on customer knowledge, strengthening pedagogical engineering and making the most of human expertise. AI has been defined as being at the service of this strategy, and not as a main attribute of the offer. The Vortex approach has also positioned employees as active ambassadors of the transformation.
The birth of a management committee
7 managers from SMEs belonging to the same regional holding company used the Vortex over 3 days to write a common strategy, explore governance principles and establish an HR policy. They redefined their managerial roles, identified key levers (customer segmentation, empowerment of teams), and created a common pact that gives meaning to the merger of the entities. By the end of the week, the directors realized that they had finally formed a true management committee, and all they had to do was announce it to their teams.
Social innovation
A foundation for the integration of disabled people used the Vortex to design an inclusive neighborhood. In just one day, 33 employees (including the manager) designed a package of services, a residents’ charter, a business model and a communications plan. What’s more, the foundation realized that the success of the project depended on the relational dynamics between stakeholders, rather than on the infrastructure itself, and that this needed to be communicated, rather than promoting the quality of the equipment and facilities.
The Vortex for
organizations is…
A strategic
tool
More lucid governance
A catalyst
for cohesion