If there is anything the last few years have taught us, it is that change is inevitable. Despite our tendency to view change through a negative lens, tinged with discomfort, change is key for evolution and necessary for an organisation's success and survival. Senior leaders know this; a vital part of their role is to lead the journey and enable followership, and to do this, they need a specific set of skills.

For leaders, it is not enough to manage change, which relates to a situation you can build control around, but rather to lead change in a world of uncertainty. They need to create calm and spark engagement in ambiguous situations.

Here is where Enabling Change comes in. With core expertise in business transformation, aligning leaders around a shared direction and enabling leaders to lead change, we are uniquely suited to partner with the senior leaders of organisations wishing to lead change while harnessing its benefits successfully.

What are the benefits of change, and why harness them?

Many organisations view change in terms of isolated projects. For example, entering a new geographical market, creating a less hierarchical management structure, closing a department or acquiring another organisation are all seen as punctual individual tasks.

This outlook means that while the current change yields successful results, it does not leave a clear roadmap for future changes. Moreover, it is a costly and time-consuming way to execute change.

Another, more productive way of handling change involves exploiting the change journey fully. Senior leaders must look past the daily challenges and implement ways to track change performance. They need to analyse what works within their organisation and what does not, pinpoint the strengths and weaknesses of their teams, identify where they need additional support and put this in place. Doing this gives them valuable data to fuel current and future change.

The change journey offers a unique opportunity, often disregarded, to build upon the information, skill set and experience the senior leadership team gains during the transition to create a framework, including a toolkit that leaders can use to navigate future changes. In preparing this, an organisation ensures that its leadership team has internal expertise and is ready to lead the organisation through every change. This is an essential part of change leadership that we incorporate into our offerings.

What we can do for you:

Enabling change is dedicated to building ownership and competence for leading and implementing change. We support senior leadership in setting a clear direction and bridging transitions, helping leaders and specialists to lead and implement change, all while change is ongoing.

Our experience has taught us that periods of change are challenging, fluid and full of learning. Therefore, supporting senior leadership during specific transitions can include more than traversing the current change.

Naturally, the first step Enabling Change takes when partnering with senior leaders is to look at the desired outcomes of the transition. We refer to this as their North Star rather than the more commonly used term "future state". The reason for this is simple; a future state is a destination, but when leading change, the journey is paramount, and the North Star is the guiding light we follow to proceed through the challenges we face.
We consider the drivers for change and look at where the organisation and the senior leadership are and where they wish to be. We create value by navigating the change with them within an impactful timeframe and providing them with the tools and the skills to gather its benefits and adapt their experience of the current transformation to future transitions.

A key focus: building the change journey and the leadership together

Enabling change has specialised in building the change journey while building the team leading the journey. We do this to enable the entire leadership team to be ready to run at the time of implementation, aligned to take full ownership of the transition. This approach is based on global research, highlighting that active and aligned executive support is the key to successful change.

A necessary step in our journey is to define the change needed to succeed and make it concrete. Concretising Change empowers us to manage it successfully. In addition, we enable the leadership team to have tough conversations up front. Conflict is usually present in all change processes, and by tackling this early on and in a neutral manner, we align the team around one shared journey.

Enabling change is dedicated to building ownership and competence for leading and implementing change

We work in a way that enables transparency and accountability, two fundamental things when dealing with organisational transition. While confidentiality is important during transition periods, we must ensure that unnecessary structures do not hamper change. So we help the senior leadership team to identify and remove these obstructions, creating transparency and space for open dialogue and alignment. This reduces the stop-and-go moments that often characterise transition, combining isolated steps into a cohesive whole to make the entire experience faster and more fruitful.

Our coordinated/comprehensive approach to change leadership offers guidance to senior leaders, streamlines the journey, and equips them to lead the organisation through future changes.

Who we are

Enabling change is a boutique consultancy led by Louise Ellekilde Fogstrup, its founder. It has been recognised as one of the top 10 Organizational Development Organisations in Europe by HR TechOutlook and HR Magazine in 2020 and 2022