illustra joins forces with Merlin5
Unlock your Accelerated Growth
Get ready to supercharge your growth whilst developing and strengthening your leadership teams with cutting-edge, virtual, AI-driven learning tools.
Pioneering AI in the virtual classroom
The new illustra accelerator marries our virtual environment’s unique capabilities for real-time data capture with the power of AI to define a completely new paradigm in virtual learning.
Empowering Coaches and Trainers
Coaches and trainers work with real-time analysis of participant interactions and responses to dynamically adjust their delivery to heighten engagement and meet the real needs of participants.
Empowering Participants
Instant tailored feedback, provocations and coaching tips as individuals and teams solve problems and plan future actions deepens understanding and speeds up the pace of learning.
Learning experiences that make a difference
Business Simulations
With a mass movement towards remote working around the world it’s no surprise to find that a vast amount of critical instructor-based training is being translated into various virtual formats. But in the midst of countless hours of virtual meetings how can these training programs reach out and grab our attention in ways that can make a difference. One solution that gaining increasing traction is the production of dramatized business simulations.
Our experienced creative and technical teams have produced video simulations for many of the worlds leading organizations. These meticulously researched simulations are designed to enable leaders to come together in virtual workshops and experience tackling challenges and opportunities that accurately mirror those to be found in their own organization or in the organizations of their customers. These simulations are being used to drive new strategies and initiatives and to enable sales and marketing teams to develop new approaches to customers and markets.
“ I never try to teach my students anything. I only try to create an environment in which they can learn.”
Albert Einstein
Practice There is no better learning environment than seeing your people in action. Facilitated by Illustra – Coached by your sales leaders
We are talking about simulations that are individually created for specific, defined sales situations.
They are not generic
They are live and facilitated in person!
They are quick to develop!
They do not cost a fortune to make!
They do need to be scripted, designed, and developed. Illustra video simulations are designed to provide immersive interactive learning experiences within virtual workshops. They are based on in depth research of the problems, objections and challenges that are encountered every day in the business. This involves Illustra and the client. However, the effort is worth it.
Simulation provides the best learning environment
Memorable: improved retention of key learnings
Engaging: challenging and demanding of attention.
Personal: each participant brings their own thinking.
Role-play enables the practice of new skills and behaviors
Sessions can be recorded for play back and learning.
We help companies achieve their objectives by unlocking the potential of high performance teams
A team mindset in a changing world
The Riddle of Teams
Effective team behavior is one of the most important determinants of business success. Our work is focused on helping people explore and deepen their understanding of the mindsets and behaviors that will enable teams to realize their potential and achieve their goals.
In his recent book “The Riddle of Teams” our faculty director Dr Valerio Pascotto draws on over 20 year experience working with teams around the world. Through numerous inspiring practical examples he reveals the impact that shifting your mindset can have on the performance of a team and its members.
Drawing on insights from “The Riddle of Teams” our workshops and programs engage participants in collaborative learning experiences that enable them to explore the impact that a team mindset can have on performance.
“No matter how brilliant your mind or strategy, if you’re playing a solo game, you’ll always lose out to a team,”
Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn cofounder
“Talent wins games, but teamwork and intelligence win championships.”
Michael Jordan
“The team you had before COVID-19 is not the same team you have now. You have two challenges on your hands: How will you rebuild your team and gain alignment, and how will you simultaneously advance your company's agenda?”
Newsweek
Unlocking the potential of high performance teams
During this program, three highly interactive workshops enable participants to explore and deepen their understanding of the mindsets and behaviors that maximize team effectiveness in today's business environment.
Using real work-life scenarios and their own intimate knowledge of the opportunities and challenges facing their own teams, participants design, conduct, and review experiments to enhance performance and drive innovation.
The final workshop in the series focuses on applying what has been learned in workshops one and two to a strategic issue identified by executives as currently critical to the organization. Issues like a strategic change initiative, diversity and inclusion and engagement and motivation
Workshop 1 Building a team mindset
The workshop is designed around the five critical disciplines that unlock the potential of high performance teams. Participants have ample opportunity to practice the necessary behaviors and skills while working in small teams to explore how learnings will be applied.
Equal Responsibility
Conscious Thought and Action
Honoring Agreements
Reaching for Excellence
Helping Each Other
Workshop 2 Leadership in a high performance team
This intensive workshop enables leaders to explore and adopt approaches and behaviors that can release untapped potential within the organization. Leaders incorporate effective coaching and feedback as key elements in their own personal leadership style
The team mindset to lead diverse, fair, and inclusive teams
Psychological safety
Addressing unconscious bias
Emotional intelligence as the conduit to collective intelligence
Manage performance, measures and experiments that embody fairness and build trust.
Driving inclusion conscious of the impact of similarity bias.
Workshop 3 A team mindset in a changing world
Addressing change effectively is critical to the success of every business. This final workshop enables participants to plan how to leverage the team mindset to address a strategic issue that has been identified as currently critical to the business. These could be:
A change initiative
Engagement and motivation
Retention
Increasing collaboration
Hybrid working environment
Contributors
Writers, artists, and subject matter experts whose ground breaking work, ideas, and insights can add a specific strategic focus to the program in support of a clients current needs and objectives.
Featured
COLLECTIVE INTELLIGENCE
At a time when businesses need to innovate every day to earn their place in the market, constant systematic experimentation has become the recognized route to success. The Breakthrough Program is an intensive action learning program that enables teams of leaders and managers to learn how to utilise experimentation to drive innovation and agility in every area of the business.
Dr. Jules Goddard and Rob James have been helping some of the world’s leading organizations use experimentation to accelerate innovation and designing for the future. This year in conjunction with publishing “Business Experimentation”a practical guide to experimentation in business, they have developed “The Breakthrough Program” with Illustra. This virtual experimentation boot camp takes teams of leaders and managers on a learning journey through all the stages of the business experiment process. During the program, they design and implement real-life experiments that often result in significant innovations for the business.
“A celebration of a truly scientific approach to business, one which seeks to find out what you don't know, rather than endlessly optimizing on the little that you do.” Rory Sutherland Founder and Vice Chairman at Ogilvy UK
“Having worked with both authors I am continually struck by the impact that they and their methodology has on senior leaders. Their approach is both provocative and pragmatic and has led to some amazing experiment results.” Roger Minton. Head of Leadership development Anglo American
A catalyst for change
The breakthrough program has been designed to act as a catalyst for culture change within an organization. Providing frontline people with the skills and opportunities to innovate opens the door to a wide variety of potentially disruptive and counterintuitive ideas. Ideas that can have the potential to revolutionize an industry.
Strategic initiatives
The program can be tailored and enhanced to support specific businesses strategies with the addition of workshops and inputs from world-renowned subject matter experts from Illustra's virtual faculty.
Little big things
While experimentation can be used to drive innovation across many different areas of the business including problem solving, performance improvement and strategic growth it is often small scale experiments and innovations that have the most significant impact on the day to day effectiveness of the business.
Dr Jules Goddard
Jules is the leading proponent and practitioner of action learning programs at London Business School, UK. He was the first person to be appointed The Mercers' School Memorial Professor of Commerce chair and now serves on the Academic Council of the European Centre for Executive Development (CEDEP) at INSEAD. He spends his time between homes in New York, London and France.
Rob James
Rob James is a Program Director at the London Business School designing and delivering leadership programs for a wide range of international clients. Previously, Head of Consultancy at OPP, one of Europe’s leading organization development consultancies specializing in behavioral change. Originally from a military background he was appointed an MBE whilst serving with Commando Forces Royal Marines.
Alan Saunders - Program Facilitator
Alan Saunders has been involved with the founding and leading of three companies. He is CEO and co-founder of Illustra. Over the past 14 years Illustra has coached and hosted thousands of live virtual workshops involving leaders and managers from around the world – in the USA, Latin America, EMEA, Asia Pacific, China and Japan. Founded in 1997 and based at the University of Sussex.
High Growth Strategies
Dr Rebecca Homkes
Strategy, while frequently discussed is often poorly understood. Growth, while exciting is often difficult. Both are about making choices about where and where not to play, how to win, how to allocate resources among many competing priorities, and critically, what to do. All of these choices must be made when you never know everything you would like to know. Strategy is fundamentally about making decisions under uncertainty:
• How can you create enough clarity to make the choices necessary to set direction?
• How can you develop a resilient strategy that can last through the uncertainty it will face?
• How can you turn this into performance and growth and execute for results? And what does it mean for the organization?
Dr. Rebecca Homkes enables leaders to explore these topics in a highly interactive fast-paced program that addresses how to develop and execute a high-growth strategy, common traps to avoid, and what this means for today’s leaders.
Dr Rebecca Homkes
Adjunct and Fellow at the London Business School. Director at the Ashridge Strategic Management Centre. Advisor to CEOs and executives globally on strategy/ execution. Her recent work on strategy execution “Why Strategy Execution unravels – and what to do about it”. Published in the March 2015 edition of the Harvard Business Review. Selected as top definitive management idea of the year. Her work sheds light on why many organizations fail when it comes to fully executing their key strategies
PROGRAMS
Virtual programs that unlock the potential of high performance teams to address strategic challenges that face the business
LEADERSHIP
Featured
INNOVATION
COACHING AND FEEDBACK
LEADING AND MANAGING CHANGE
SUSTAINABILITY
LEADING TEAMS
Featured
DIVERSITY AND INCLUSION
Sales
Featured
COLLECTIVE INTELLIGENCE
Featured
Transforming insights into business outcomes
Targeted action based learning
Technologies to support modular action based programs that achieve targeted business outcomes
Information, interactions, Action Plans and Workbooks linked across multiple workshops
Tools to engage participants in processes for innovation that can benefit the whole organization
Generating reports that enable you to harness the collective intelligence within your organization
The Experimentation Mindset
Dr Jules Goddard
One of the most critical steps in developing a culture of innovation is recognizing the importance of experimentation. The experimentation mindset frees us from self-imposed constraints, allowing us to learn and improve continually. In this program, Jules Goddard, a preeminent thinker and author on strategy and innovation, helps participants explore the role that experimentation can play in their own work. Allowing the individual, the team, and the organization to learn, innovate, and adapt at the speed that is now essential in today's constantly changing business environment.
During this program participants design and implement their own experiments, often giving rise to practical innovations that can be of benefit to the whole enterprise
High Growth Strategies
Dr Rebecca Homkes
Strategy, while frequently discussed is often poorly understood. Growth, while exciting is often difficult. Both are about making choices about where and where not to play, how to win, how to allocate resources among many competing priorities, and critically, what to do. All of these choices must be made when you never know everything you would like to know. Strategy is fundamentally about making decisions under uncertainty:
• How can you create enough clarity to make the choices necessary to set direction?
• How can you develop a resilient strategy that can last through the uncertainty it will face?
• How can you turn this into performance and growth and execute for results? And what does it mean for the organization?
Dr. Rebecca Homkes enables leaders to explore these topics in a highly interactive fast-paced program that addresses how to develop and execute a high-growth strategy, common traps to avoid, and what this means for today’s leaders.
A Team of Leaders
Paul Gustavson and Stuart Liff
Having a team of leaders can provide an organization with an enormous competitive advantage. They get this by having a culture whereby each team member/leader uses her full potential and collectively they leverage the creativity and desire that everyone has to make a difference in the workplace and with their customers and partners. Members of these teams of leaders have a great sense of meaning in what and why they do what they do and that translates into results. In this powerful virtual program Paul and Stuart enable leaders to explore tools and approaches that free up the creativity and potential of individual team members and transform the culture of the team
Ambidexterity - Balancing Exploitation and Exploration
Many company leaders want innovation and profitable growth without changing the way they’ve operated for years. Other leaders want to rapidly explore new business opportunities without nurturing established practices that ensure financial and operating stability. In this virtual program based on his widely acclaimed book “The Ambidextrous Organization”, Jens Maier helps us see how we can develop a style of leadership that balances both of these vital concerns.
