Regardless of your overarching challenge or goal, we help clients shift their beliefs, mindsets, and behaviors for positive change. We make the experience of transformation and change more engaging, more fun, and more effective. 

For leaders and teams who are ready and willing, we help you build bridges and move from domination to partnership ways of being and doing to deliver meaningful innovation and purposeful prosperity. We help you:

• Align innovation strategy with business goals and build innovation capabilities
• Facilitate strategy and working sessions using tools like LEGO^® SERIOUS PLAY^® to unlock creative thinking, conflict constructively, and build alignment
• Build cultures of trust, curiosity, and psychological safety
• Reshape what “strength,” “power,” and “leadership” really mean in the modern workplace and help leaders become partnership leaders

We’ve been mostly industry agnostic over our 20+ years of client work. As we move forward, we seek clients who are committed to the principles of conscious capitalism and doing well by doing good.

Past client engagements include Fortune 500 companies, the largest US private company, local government, non-profits, and start-ups across these industries: medical device, healthcare, manufacturing, agriculture/food supply, transportation, retail, technology, telecommunications, power sports, commercial real estate, and banking/finance/insurance.

A company’s founder simultaneously creates a group that comes together to accomplish a purpose and, by the force of his or her personality, shapes the group’s culture. Founders bring with them assumptions, values, and behavior patterns that form culture. Because the founder had the original idea, he or she will typically have biases on how to get the idea fulfilled – biases based on previous cultural experiences and personality traits.

Entrepreneurs tend to be very strong-minded about what to do and how to do it. Founder assumptions have an impact on his or her customer focus, management style, decision-making style, levels of communication and trust with other employees, risk-taking, performance management style, and emphasis on what gets rewarded and recognized.

Schein shared that the “ultimate organizational culture will always reflect the complex interaction between (1) the assumptions and theories that founders bring to the group initially and (2) what the group learns subsequently from its own experiences.” 

Culture formation is complicated by the possibility that the founder has conflicting assumptions.  An example is a “founder who states a philosophy of delegation but who retains tight control.” Conflicting assumptions can interfere with company operations.

As the business grows and environmental factors are impacted, old assumptions need to be addressed to determine if they are no longer working and if they are holding the organization back. The BIG issue here is that because the culture is already embedded, it is often hard for many people to hear, accept, or even deal with information that is contrary to their current way of behaving.

As a founder, it’s incredibly important to question your personal beliefs and assumptions often as well as those across your company.

In addition, as an organization grows and new people join the group, new assumptions are brought in that may conflict with those originally held by the founder and those embedded into the culture. Founders who manage these changes effectively often find a way to hybridize the old assumptions with new ones in order to best address environmental changes and business needs.

Source: Schein, E. H. (1983, Summer). The role of the founder in creating organizational culture. Organizational Dynamics, 13-28.

Aligned with our 3D Creative Solution Design™ process, we always start with Discovery to understand your current state, where are you headed, and what you believe your challenges are, plus a more in-depth exploration of what the real challenges are, so we have clarity before making recommendations.

Nothing is “typical” when you engage with ALCEMIS, which we love. We’ve done short 1-hour to multi-day workshops and trainings as well as multi-month and multi-year consulting engagements with our clients. A typical initial coaching engagement consists of nine (9) sessions including current state assessment, offer, six cycles of development, and close. Possibilities are endless. Let us know what you’re working on and want to accomplish.

Measurement depends on the type and scope of the engagement. We use more activity and satisfaction-based measurements for workshops and learning engagements. We use observation and closing conversations for coaching engagements. 

Larger change and transformation engagements need a more robust strategy and plan. However, we’ve found it a strange phenomenon that leaders often say they need data and “proof” but are unwilling to make strategic choices and commit the resources to measure shifts, change, and success for larger engagements.

Some people say that you measure what matters. We also know that what matters isn’t always something that can be measured by traditional quantitative methods, and the work to provide qualitative measures is often seen by leaders as too time-consuming and costly for the return.

For larger engagements, we have a Behavior Measurement Approach to help leaders decide between strategic choices that help them understand successful milestones and outcomes including Business, Employee, and Change metrics.

The resulting Behavior Measurement Plan captures: Desired Behaviors and Who to Measure • What to Measure • How to Measure • When to Measure • Who (will measure, will receive the results, and will action) • Risk Mitigation

Culture is the way of being of an organization – it’s the explicit and implicit ways things get done. If your culture is rooted in traditional systems of top-down hierarchy and domination ways of oppression, power over and power under, shame, blame and fear, your culture blocks innovation – both external new to market innovation and internal innovation for how to better deliver your services and solutions.

Organizations experience several negative outcomes including:

• Employees stop trying to share really creative and beyond the box ideas that could bring significant value.
• Humans desire agency – our capacity to use resources and personal power to fulfill our potential. As such, we dislike being told what to do. Those who think we want to be told what to do and force their agendas and rules on us are controlling and dominating.
• It’s exhausting and unhealthy to continually be watching out for people who seek to control you or punish you because they believe it’s their “right” due to hierarchy, patriarchy, social status, or other perceived superior status characteristics. It sucks joy and positive life energy out of you. 
• It leads to burnout and disengagement, and potentially even quality and safety mistakes.
• You get reduced employee engagement, higher turnover, and their related costs. In fact, Gallup’s research continues to show dismally low employee engagement. The research also shows links between low engagement and lower scores on important drivers of organizational success. (January 2024 https://www.gallup.com/workplace/608675/new-workplace-employee-engagement-stagnates.aspx)
• You get “ho-hum” or, worse, negative experiences for your patients and customers; this matters because great customer experiences lead to business longevity

One of the things we’ve been hearing is leaders saying we must have hierarchy. YET…traditional command and control hierarchy is a huge roadblock to being innovative. In traditional command and control hierarchies, rigid rankings are used to control others and keep people deemed inferior “in their place,” quiet, and unwilling to go beyond the box.

Frankly, power over others is uninspiring, debilitating, and keeps new ideas subverted. 

Riane Eisler coined the term “Hierarchies of Actualization” to describe how hierarchies are constructed in Partnership Systems. In Hierarchies of Actualization, leaders, managers, parents, and others in positions of authority seek to uplift and empower others. The role of the leader needs a mindset shift from leader as the one who tells others what to do to leader as guide, facilitator, and enabler of bringing our best to the world.

Our definition of leadership aligns with being a Partnership Leader. Leadership is about unleashing the passion, power, and potential of people toward positive impact. Among other characteristics, Partnership Leaders are both inner and outer-focused. They know that leadership is a way of being and a way of doing. It’s about who you are, what you do, and how you do it. Partnership Leaders engage others with empathy, compassion, forgiveness, respect, and integrity. They listen and ask generative instead of punitive questions. They sense and respond to what’s emerging.