About
Vicissitude is a specialised business consultancy that has been established to help develop and maintain happy and productive workplaces.
We do this by putting the heart back into our places of work – remembering that workplaces are made up of people – not just their heads but also their hearts.
We need people to bring their positive emotion to the workplace to drive their commitment and engagement. This is how our teams and organisations achieve extraordinary results. To assume we only need dispassionate rationality in our quest to do our best work is folly.
“Humans are born to care. Our institutions magnify or depress the human capacity to care.”
When we allow people to bring their whole selves to work and create workplace systems and structures that support them to utilise their full capabilities amazing things happen. We encourage citizenship behaviour, innovative thinking, accountability and full engagement.
At Vicissitude, we apply the learnings of neuropsychology, positive psychology and the latest systems thinking to understand how to unleash the full potential of humans to work together to produce extraordinary results.
We believe in accentuating the positive in performance and focusing on future possibility rather than being limited by the past. This is encapsulated in our tag line change for the better.
The turbulent times in which we operate demand new ways of organising, engaging and empowering to bring the very best of themselves to work and to welcome both their hearts and their heads in making their own authentic contribution.
“Change in nature happens everywhere, all the time, in a self-organising urge that comes from every cell and every organism, with no need for central command and
control to give orders or pull levers.”
— Frederic Laloux
People matter to the success of organisations now more than ever before as exponential change grips every workplace. As it becomes increasingly difficult to maintain great teams and retain great people, it is more important than ever for them to love coming to work.
Amazing things happen when they do.
The creation of collaborative communities, innovative mindsets and intense engagement in the work result. People can align around a common cause and lift from the efforts of a group of individuals to a supportive and interdependent team. When people truly trust and work together they can unleash the power of performance that far surpasses the efforts of the individual parts.
“Traditional pyramidal structures demand too much of too few and not enough of everyone else.”
Organisations as Living Systems
Vicissitude seeks inspiration for how we should best organise ourselves from the natural world and draws ideas from the organic systems that surround us.
We believe that our organisations can and should learn a lot from nature. We can and should see our organisations as living systems. Our more complex environments fuelled by rapid technological change require greater agility.
As eloquently argued by Frederic Laloux, the new paradigm of organisational structures seems to require more self management, peer relationship building and collaboration rather than a rigidly hierarchical design that limits the flow of communication, innovation and decision-making at each level.
The world around us is full of clues about how we might best organise ourselves and adapt our structures and functioning to not just survive but to thrive in an ever evolving environment.
Vicissitude welcomes the opportunity to work with individuals, teams and organisations to help create change for the better.