The on going business obsession with productivity and efficiency is no longer working. 75% of employees are disengaged, businesses are being over-‐turned by ideas driven start-ups, the FTSE 100 churns every decade, the self-employed have rejected office hours and office desks to form the fastest growing sector of the economy.
The disrupters, businesses founded in the past 10 years, have responded to this by following new models of business. They have put creativity at their heart and enable their businesses to be innovation led, agile, quick to market and fulfilling. Traditional businesses continues to struggle to implement these new models and is at threat of obsolescence.
In response to this I have teamed up with Nadya Powell to co-found Utopia. Utopia’s mission is to ‘Re-‐wire business for the Age of Creativity’. Utopia will consult, enable and empower business to harness creativity to be agile, innovation led and quick to market and therefore drive competitive advantage.
Utopia is the culmination of 40 years of relevant experience from both of us. I have previously driven creative thinking across organisations like Profero and Cheil and accelerated creative thinking and change through Creative Social and Hyper Island. Nadya has driven Innovation thinking through Innovation Social and her role as Chief Innovation Officer at Dare whilst also delivering Purpose and Branding work through Dare and Sunshine. And we have both led the agenda on Diversity and Inclusion through The Great British Diversity Experiment, Token Man and the So White Initiative.
Aimed at marketing led companies and creative agencies, our consultancy will offer business transformation to businesses across five key service areas we believe are critical to re-‐wiring business:
- Purpose: ensure business purposes are relevant for the age of creativity and embed them within the hearts of minds of employees.
- Creative Leadership: enable and empower leaders to use models and techniques of creativity to drive competitive advantage for themselves, their team and their business.
- Creative Culture: embed creative techniques and models across the organisation empowering agile, outcome focussed and proactive behaviour.
- Diversity and Inclusion: build and retain teams that provide a diversity of thought as opposed to cultural consensus.
- Innovation: embed innovation techniques and models within the organisation enabling innovative thinking and outcomes across the business.
Each service programme is bespoke and focused on co-‐working with the organisation to train, consult and enable the teams across five key stages; Horizon setting, Audit, Accelerate, Re-wiring strategy and Re-wire. The outcomes Utopia will deliver include increased engagement and retention of talent, improved relevancy to key audiences, agility and speed to market and new product and service design.
As AI leads to greater automation in the workplace, creativity and emotional intelligence will be critical to successful leadership. Utopia will work with businesses to identify the elements that need the most change and bring in the right people to deliver it. Utopia will work alongside the teams to make that change happen, building towards Utopia together. We believe business isn’t working. Sadly creativity, the most valuable resource, is all too often undervalued reducing teams to autonoma simply following orders. Utopia will drive change across business purpose, leadership, business culture, innovation practices and the individuals businesses employ. Humanity is capable of incredible things but only if we release our imaginations and re-‐wire business for the age of creativity. I cannot wait to work with the Utopians and use our immense wealth of collective skill and experience to do exactly that..
Alongside us, we will be launching with a collective of over 30 change makers called ‘Utopians’, taken from a range of disciplines, who will co-‐deliver the change programmes. Between them they have over 500 years experience across the core service areas. Utopians include: John Monks and Lizzie Shupak from Curve; Nadia Nagamootoo from Avenir Consulting; Ali Hanan from Creative Equals; Tolu Farinto from LFA; Marc Runacus from Pride AM, Marianne Waite from Think Designable; Nene Parsotam and Ete Davies from Stripes; Bejay Mulenga from Supa Academy; Leyya Satar and Roshni Goyate from The Other Box; Sulaiman Kahn from ThisAbility; Selma Nicholls from Looks Like Me and John Owen from The Decision Practice. As well as of course Creative Social and Innovation Social, which we will both continue to be support.
We are in conversation with several businesses as well as seeking additional Utopians to join the community. If you have consultancy experience in Utopia’s service and believe in the power of creativity to transform business then do contact us.
In the meantime you can find more details HERE.
