Interview with the Ensemble Enabler Team

We spoke with the visionary Ensemble Enabler Team — not only a highly specialized management consultancy, but also especially personable professionals!
Find out here what raw diamonds, collective knowledge and the Munich Town Hall have to do with all this.

A glance at your corporate vision as described on your website makes it clear that Ensemble Enabler has made it a priority to embody the next phase in the evolution of consulting practice.
Can you tell our readers about the origins of this ambitious vision, was it triggered by any particular situation?

Like many new ideas, the origin of Ensemble Enabler emerged out of a challenge to solve a business problem. Before Jeffrey founded Ensemble Enabler, he worked for classical management consultancies. In his role, he managed teams of consultants to research and address client’s issues. In one instance, he was sent to consult with a company facing near-bankruptcy. There was no budget to bring his team along, so he was alone on the job. On his way to the client, he started thinking out of the box and wondered how he could work in this unusual set-up without his usual back-up team.

Why not ask the employees in the company for their ideas?

It seemed like a good approach given the situation. He spent his time on-site interviewing the employees – some of whom had worked there for 20 years or more. Most of the employees had previously never been asked by the management for their suggestions or ideas. The employees were quite motivated to finally have the opportunity share their experience and insights to management! Instead of making the ‘normal’ consultant presentation, Jeffrey asked the employees to present their own ideas to managers. In doing so, they felt that they were being taking seriously for the first time. The company ultimately managed to come back from bankruptcy and became a leader in their field. For Jeffrey he realized that his management consulting days were over; it was time to cooperate with employees at all levels of the organization and provide ways for their wisdom and ideas to be heard to inform a company’s on-going success.

Ensemble Enabler was established as a result of this thought-provoking experience.

You help companies to get to know their own employees more thoroughly, in order to identify the particular areas of knowledge they possess which can then be deployed for the benefit of the business.
I cannot help but draw comparisons with a rough diamond which with the right polish acquires a whole new value …?

An uncut diamond is an apt metaphor for the focus of Ensemble Enabler’s collaboration with companies. The unique brilliance of a diamond in the rough can only be experienced when it is cut.

The collective wisdom and know-how of a company’s employees – at all levels of the organization – is just like a diamond in the rough.

Through the careful cutting and polishing of a diamond, it gradually becomes more brilliant and, as a result, obtains a higher value than the uncut stone. The same value is unleashed when the knowledge and hidden potential of employees are unleashed by promoting their active engagement to think together to discover creative solutions. This collective knowledge provides a real value-added for any organization. Through this process an organization sparkles with energy like a beautifully cut diamond.

The source of this sparkling energy emanates from the un-tapped potential of the employees themselves.

This process takes many forms depending upon the needs of the organization. Out of these approaches to employee engagement, a revived mindset emerges which is characterized by more collaboration, experimentation, boldness and agility. Brilliant cut diamonds have the most facets and the most sparkle in the light. Giving employees at all levels of an organization a voice and listening to their wisdom creates this unique sparkle which provides the foundation for an organization to create more value for their business endeavours.

What means do you employ to bring this knowledge to light, given in particular the variety of characters you encounter?

Ensemble Enabler makes the inherent wisdom of a company visible as a means to foster innovation and strategic value for these organizations. Our work focuses to nurture leadership at all levels of an organization, foster a thriving corporate culture together with the use of cross-functional dialogue in order to promote on-going business development.

We work together with leaders, providing executive coaching and leadership workshops to foster a growth mindset.

Through participatory initiatives, Ensemble Enabler engages with all levels of the business to cultivate organization skills which are required for today’s business challenges.

Towards this end, we collaborate in small and large-scale groups on both a face-to-face and virtual basis. Our approaches create environments of openness and trust where employee voices are heard and acknowledged as a basis to inform future action. Feedback loops and analysis enable this valuable input to be made accessible to decision makers on all levels of the organization.

Please tell us about your personal favourite project at Ensemble Enabler, and what this year still has in store!

We would like to highlight three favorite projects all of which reflect the importance of language in Ensemble Enabler’s initiatives.

One pan-European project for a Swiss-based multi-national corporation required that all of our materials be translated into fourteen different European languages ranging from Norwegian to Ukrainian!

The quality of translation is key for the effective communication of our initiatives in a person’s native language.

Working together with Baker & Co, our language project manager, Suzanne Bürger masterfully coordinated the entire process – from providing easily used formats for translation, managing the time schedule to providing the final translations of all the various workshop materials to our on-site client contacts on USB sticks! Ms. Bürger´s liaison between Ensemble Enabler and Baker & Co is key to the successful realization of such a complex initiative. As an expert translator in her own right, she is able to understand the requirements and expectations of all the contact persons throughout the entire process. This permits Ensemble Enabler to recognize potential problematic issues and challenges in order to proactively find workable solutions.

A current cultural renewal project with a European subsidiary of a Japanese automobile parts company offers a range of language challenges.

This project has required a broad spectrum of translations into German, Spanish and Hungarian: ranging from brochures, PowerPoint presentations, roll-ups, posters, to workshop materials. Highlight of this work is the translation of 10 Peer-to-Peer modules which explore the values of the client’s company through small scale dialogue. Our language project manager, Ms. Bürger, carefully created a German language version of the Peer-to-Peer modules in Ensemble Enabler’s corporate design which served as a template to be used by the Hungarian and Spanish translators. Even video sub-titles were created for some modules which were based on the original transcript of the video’s text. (More on this approach: www.p2p-learning.net or www.p2p-lernen.de)

Last but not least we would like to honour our collaboration with Ms, Bürger and Baker & Company in preparation of a tri- lingual World Café (German, English and Arabic) which was held in Munich’s Altes Rathaus.

This project was designed and realized by Ensemble Enabler’s non-profit organization World Café Europe. (www.worldcafe.eu) In order to promote this event to a large refugee community, a short video about the World Café was translated into languages from Africa (Somali and Tigrinya), Near East (Arabic) and Southern Asia (Dari). Two hundred participants — both refugees and representatives of support organizations — came together to explore possibilities for the successful integration of refugees into Munich. Their input served to inform the city of Munich’s Integration Plan for Refugees.

Links to Ensemble Enabler’s projects mentioned in the Interview:

Ensemble Enabler Homepage
World Café Europe Homepage
Ergbnisse des World Cafés mit Geflüchteten