We start operating as TRANSITUS Management Consulting before incorporating as TRANSITUS Inc. The dot-com wave is crashing; businesses are hurting… It’s definitely a painful start for our newly-born agency!
Business is slowing starting to pick up on the management consulting, learning and speaking sides of our business. During these first two years, we formalize and further develop our core intellectual property (IP) – including:
- 5 Mindset Shifts to move from sluggish change management to nimble change leadership
- The nimble leader’s Change Stethoscope™ to monitor resistance-commitment on the fly
- The Six Change Personas™ to multiply our impact & resilience as change-makers
Edmond Mellina, our President & Co-founder, started developing our intellectual property during his former career as a transformation executive. These were the early years of change management: Harvard’s John Kotter had just published his book titled “Leading Change”; and Prosci had not yet started researching the field.
Mainstream businesses were operating in slow-motion environments: their pace of change was relatively controlled; the dust had time to settle, so to speak.
However, as a transformation executive, Edmond was responsible for leading large-scale, complex, and strategic change in fundamentally different environments: fast-paced, constantly evolving, and disrupted. These sectors were total outliers.
Because the early thinkers in change management focussed on the slow-motion mainstream, the approaches they devised were phase-by-phase, template-heavy (e.g. Prosci’s ADKAR model and its humongous toolbox). We call it SLUGGISH CHANGE MANAGEMENT. It was no match for fast-paced, disrupted environments i.e. the outliers in which Edmond worked. Therefore, he had to develop a fundamentally different way: NIMBLE CHANGE LEADERSHIP.
Fast forward to today: all businesses are now operating in environments characterized by fast-paced, constant & disruptive change. The old mainstream is gone; what used to be outlier is now mainstream. Hence, SLUGGISH CHANGE MANAGEMENT is going the way of the Dodo bird. We are now in the era of NIMBLE CHANGE LEADERSHIP.
To help establish our firm as the go-to agency in its field, Edmond writes articles for business publications around the globe (Canada, USA, UK, France, India, etc.). He speaks at conferences and corporate events. Various media organizations – including the BBC – start interviewing him as an expert source.
We sign a series of consulting engagements with FundSERV – the indispensable connectivity hub for the Canadian investment industry: strategic transformation, nimble capability-building, culture shift, etc.
Concurrently, we work on a large-scale culture shift engagement with Sun Life – which gets us to the insurance side of the Financial Services sector.
Recognizing the growing demand for our learning & development (L&D) offerings, Pascal Karsenty joins our leadership team as Chief Learner Advocate. We launch the ORCHANGO brand, initially dedicated to the learning side of our business.
We continue delivering our management consulting and speaking services under the TRANSITUS brand.
In 2007, Pascal Karsenty goes to Jeddah (Saudi Arabia) to deliver our flagship NIMBLE CHANGE LEADERSHIP program to the Islamic Development Group (IDBG). Our involvement with the Financial Services sector becomes even broader.
The following two years, Edmond Mellina & Pascal team up to guide IDBG through a large-scale strategic transformation with a strong culture-shift element. While the North American market collapses due to the sub-prime financial crisis, we are as busy as ever.
We decide to retire the TRANSITUS brand and do business under one single brand: ORCHANGO.
Returning from a business trip in the USA where he was exposed to learning gamification, Pascal throws a challenge to the team: “Let’s gamify our flagship NIMBLE CHANGE LEADERSHIP program!”
We work on developing the STEP UP!™ Game simulation, which has proven to be hugely effective & popular.
During the fall that year, we test an early Minimum Viable Product (MVP) of STEP UP!™ with a live cohort in Calgary (Alberta, Canada). It’s a big success. We quickly finalize the game and go to market with it!
We sign a series of key engagements with public entities such as: Technical Standards & Safety Authority, Travel Industry Commission of Ontario, Toronto Community Housing, etc.
The main themes are: strategical transformation, culture shift, and/or nimble capability-building – i.e. our core areas of focus.
At the same time, we further develop our IP:
- CHECK UP!™ Survey
- Nimble Capability Building Roadmap
- Co-Disruptors™ and their Three Super-Powers
- Etc.
Edmond launches his popular #NimbleVLOG in October that year. The inaugural episode is titled: “Build the Emotional Case™ for Change like Greta Thunberg”.
The COVID pandemic provides the impetus to pivot to live-virtual. In additional to the traditional in-person approach, all our programs and services are now available virtually or via an hybrid format – including our flagship NIMBLE CHANGE LEADERSHIP program with its STEP UP!™ Game simulation.
Various players from the ever-changing pharma/healthcare sector hire our agency. Through these partnerships, we transform their businesses strategically, shift their corporate culture, and/or help them become nimbler.
These clients include:
- GSK, Baxter and AstraZeneca (multinational pharma / healthcare companies)
- Health PEI (provincial health authority)
- Peterborough Regional Health Centre (hospital)
- SEIU Healthcare (union)
- Etc.
Leveraging the unique IP we developed while helping GSK make better decisions, faster, and at the right level in the business, we launch our D.A.I. Master Class for Nimble Decision Making – along with its companion Decision Hackasprints™ (as per our Learn-and-Execute® methodology).
Responding to the demand from a key client (Baxter), we adapt for audiences of B2B Sales & Marketing professionals our flagship NIMBLE CHANGE LEADERSHIP program – powered by the STEP UP!™ Game simulation.
- B2B sales & marketing professionals are involved in very complex sales.
- As such, they need to navigate within their client organizations challenging people dynamics (with lots of internal politics); and they need to nimbly influence the change related to the solutions they are selling
- So in essence, B2B sales & marketing pros are true change makers / change influencers – albeit in the external environment.
To raise their game and bring in more revenue, they now have a super-effective & highly-immersive learning program!