How We Work — Our Approach

What's it like to work with Blue Summit? This section will tell you the kind of results our clients have reported, our approach to client projects, and how we're different from most strategy consultants and coaches.

Blue Summit is a network-style consulting and coaching firm. We draw on a variety of people and resources to meet the needs of our clients. We are known for our creative collaboration style of working and our integration of the disciplines of strategy and leadership into what we call strategic leadership.

After working with us, you can expect the following results:

You'll see the big picture of your situation more clearly. Trends, opportunities, strategic choices -- whatever we're working on -- gets mapped out in real time to give your team a big picture view of reality. It becomes much easier to see connections and draw insights.

Your team will reach a consensus on a vision and clear direction. Through a series of carefully planned activities, your team will be supported in getting to a bigger, more expansive vision and a clearer path of execution. The process of working together through each step of the process results in more consensus and buy-in.

You'll get a clear map of your strategic choices and know which ones to take. Your strategic choices will be mapped out and structured into "levers" and "building blocks". It becomes much easier to understand your "choice space" and the best path forward.

Your organization's culture will become more collaborative and creative. Making your company’s most important decisions through a collaborative and creative process makes people feel involved . . . that their ideas are valued. New possibilities open for how people can work together and contribute ideas.

You will have the buy-in, clear plans, and support to make your strategy a reality. Once you have a strategy, the real work begins. You will have a team that has worked together to create a consensus plan with clear gameplans. We provide guidance along the way, create accountability, help develop culture & leadership, and support revision & renewal of the strategy as needed.

We work from a new paradigm of how people plan and lead organizations. By working with us, you can help develop or reinforce this new paradigm in your company.

Old Paradigm	New Paradigm
Top-down & hierarchy	Teamwork & collaboration
Maximize shareholder value	Optimize & integrate all stakeholder value
Focus on competition & market share	Focus on creating new value
Vague vision statements	Inspiring, clear, concrete visions
Strategy reports and slide decks	Visual maps
Decide with analytic mind	Decide with mind, intuition, heart, and gut
Decisive leadership	Authentic leadership
Companies are purely profit-making entities	Companies create social, personal, environmental, and financial value

To deliver results we bring together the best tools, processes, and methodologies available to advance the art of strategic leadership.

Graphic Facilitation. A cornerstone of our work, we use Graphic Facilitation for creating big picture visualizations in real time with groups. The important elements of the group's conversations and processes are mapped out in real time in front of the group on large 4-foot by 8-foot wallcharts. Meetings are consistently more participatory, creative, and strategic -- and achieve greater productivity than those led with conventional facilitation. The discipline of graphic facilitation was pioneered and developed by SRI International, Interaction Associates, and The Grove Consultants International. We use the Grove's tools and processes extensively in our work and often collaborate with them to meet client needs. Most of the graphic templates we use are available as Graphic Guides® from The Grove Store.

Group Process. Considering diverse perspectives, getting an entire organization aligned, and involving outside stakeholders all require group process expertise. We have extensive experience designing and leading processes that include multi-team dialog, stakeholder engagement, group decision-making, and virtual team technologies.

Creative Visioning. Getting a group to shift from near-term operational thinking to long-term possibility thinking requires tools and skills in creative visioning. We have acquired a virtual toy box of exercises and processes from the fields of creativity, visioning, improvisation, scenario planning, and multimedia.

Strategy Mapping. Strategy mapping is a way of developing visual strategy using a building-block approach. Strategies at multiple levels in an organization can connect to each other in a top-down hierarchy. Maps can be easily translated into Balanced Scorecards and other performance management tools. Our Strategy Map tool is based in part on the work of Harvard professors Robert Kaplan & David Norton.

Integral Approach. "Integral" means more balanced, comprehensive, interconnected, and whole. By using an Integral approach we can include more perspectives, in order to be more fully conscious and effective. For example, to work on a complex issue, we may need to include the inner experience and development of individuals, the current state and evolution of an organization's culture, the systems and strategies of the business, and the environment or ecosystem the company operates in.

Personal Development. Great strategic leadership requires the development of personal and leadership qualities. We are well-versed in integrating and applying models of leadership development, personality theory, and presence-based inquiry.

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