Our Service Areas
Strategy
Strategy informs culture. If your plan is to bring a few executives into a room to hammer out a business strategy and hope that your whole organization will follow through on that strategy, we’d love to help you shift to another way!
It turns out that people support what they helped to build. So, involving a slice of the organization in business strategy development will yield a much more complete and supported strategy that doesn’t just sit on the shelf. It becomes a living document that actually drives the day-to-day work.
In fact, when you work with us, your strategy emerges as a “visual journey map”, drawn by our in-house artists, so that it doesn’t just sit on the shelf, but becomes a living map that actually drives the day-to-day work.
You’ve undoubtedly heard the quote by Peter Drucker, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.”…what you may not have heard is that this is only true if your culture is not aligned to your strategy.
We help you align strategy, culture and DEI so that they all support each other.
Culture
Culture is not the “soft” stuff… in fact it’s the hard stuff that helps you deliver on your strategy. Culture is ultimately about behaviors. What are the behaviors that a) help us deliver on our strategy so we can win? and b) help each of our people win?
You don’t have to choose between your people or your organization winning. We believe you can have both.
With over 100 years of combined experience helping organizations assess, articulate and activate their culture, we can help you realize the benefits of culture alignment.
DEI
DEI is broken, but it doesn’t have to be. Over the last 50 years, most DEI efforts have failed or have even had the opposite effects of what we’ve wanted.
There are three key reasons why:
We have focused on activities, not on outcomes
We have focused on shaming, not on structures
We have not clarified our “DEI why” in a way that aligns strategy, culture, and DEI
At Caravann:
We believe that transformative DEI can help both people and organizations win.
We believe that it needs to be aligned with your core business strategy so that it no longer becomes a “nice to have”, but rather becomes a core determinant of your success.
We believe that change requires energy. Unfortunately most DEI efforts sap energy and make people feel bad.
We believe in a no-enemies approach to DEI that includes a lot more joyous celebration of our differences.
We help you articulate a DEI strategy and then roll up our sleeves to help you activate that strategy with a keen eye on achieving real and measurable DEI outcomes.
Our Client’s Journey
We co-create the journey with our clients by starting with strategy, then thinking of culture as the way to activate the strategy, all with a lens to DEIB. Since change begins from within and usually with the top-down, we focus on leadership capabilities to model what is needed to set the tone for the rest of the organization.
Our Approach
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Assessment
Strategy: You are the experts of your own domain, but we use our facilitation chops to bring your experts together to hear each other and start to craft the key priority areas of your emerging strategy.
Culture: We listen deeply through empathy-based interviews and focus groups, to uncover the true culture that already exists (the good, the bad, and the ugly) and provide you with key themes and recommendations aligned to your strategy.
DEI: We carry out surveys, interviews, and focus groups to deeply understand your current and desired efforts around DEI. We develop themes and work with you to clarify your “DEI why” that is aligned to culture and strategy.
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Articulation
With Strategy, we engage the entire organization. We craft an efficient process to get the whole organization chiming in on the key priority areas and then facilitate a process for your leaders to refine and narrow to some key actions that are going to move the needle. This will not end up being a laundry list of everything your organization needs to do. Strategy is about making choices.
For culture, we assemble a crack team of “culture champions” from your organization to help shape and wordsmith a draft set of values and then vet that with the whole organization so that you have deep buy-in on your new values.
For DEI, we work with you to craft a coherent DEI strategy, complete with visuals and clear metrics and milestones.
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Activation
We visualize and actualize your strategy. Most strategic plans end up on the shelf without much impact on day-to-day actions. We use our crack team of graphic facilitators to create real-time visuals of your desired future and help to create strategy road maps that people actually like to look at. These road maps help you spread the story of your strategy so that it’s always front and center.
With culture we embed your new values or “this means we statements” into just about everything you do like hiring, feedback, promotion, systems, processes, rewards, onboarding and leadership development.
With DEI we don’t just drop the strategy on to your lap and wish you well, we roll up our sleeves and help you actually implement it. This could include convening your leadership teams, facilitating workshops, helping you reduce bias in hiring and promotion, and coaching leaders to lead inclusively.
FUNCTIONAL EXPERTISE
Change management
Qualitative and quantitative insights
Communication strategy
Culture transformation
Strategic planning
OKRs and priority setting
Employee Engagement
Workplace & Employee well-being
KEY CAPABILITIES
Executive coaching
Group facilitation
Organizational development
Training and development
Keynote presentations
Leadership retreats
Graphic recording
Culture summits and rituals
SUBJECT AREAS
A Better Return to Work
Human-centered design
Organizational Psychology
Isolation, Loneliness, and Burnout
Emotional Intelligence
Prosocial workplaces
Mission, vision, and values
Employee Value Proposition & Employer Brand