I’ve had the pleasure of working with Adrian Jobson, director of Acculture, for just over three years.
With a Master of Business, Organisational Change and Consulting, Adrian is a business owner, somatic coach and innovator with an intense curiosity about creating value in the SME sector. He’s also an HBDI® Certified Practitioner.
One of the exciting projects I’ve watched Adrian design, launch and expand on is the Innovate to Excelerate Growth Program with Wyndham City Council. I was so inspired by what Adrian and the Wyndham business community were doing that I wanted to share.
What is Innovate to Excelerate?
The intensive 12-week course combines one-on-one business coaching, tailored feedback and group workshops, helping business owners to build their professional networks.
The program is in its fourth round and has 10 to 12 local business owners in each. To apply, you must reside in the Wyndham catchment area, have been in business for less than three years and be facing some barriers to growth.
Innovate to Excelerate has been recognised as a wonderful catalyst for sustainable, local growth in the Wyndham business community.
The focus of this program is to help new business owners understand themselves, the market and how they can innovate and evolve their existing offering.
One component of the program involves each participant completing the HBDI® survey to determine their thinking preferences. They explore how these preferences may be helping or hindering them in their business, using the Whole Brain® Model to look at how their preferences may impact their business plan, communication, recruitment and ability to innovate. Mindset, as research has shown, is central to success. And preference of course is influential.
In the innovation space, we find that a lot of people (regardless of thinking preference) either shut down an idea too quickly or move to the planning stage without “staying and playing” long enough in the creative space. Alternately, we see people coming up with lots of ideas but not planning or implementing them.
During the program, Adrian uses the Whole Brain® ThinkAbout™ Creative Thinking and Innovation session to provide a framework for realising the full potential of ideas, as well as highlighting the impact of personal preference on the growth process and how to translate this to business outcomes.
Has Innovate to Excelerate been successful?
The program feedback has been resoundingly positive and Adrian has been asked to return after each successful session. We’ll run two more programs in 2020.
For me, the standout features of the program were the calibre of people who were present, the courage to ask for support, the intense diversity of people, products and services in the room and the positive outcomes shared and celebrated.
It’s a gifted facilitator who can engage and meet the needs of such a diverse group of people – with different cultural backgrounds, education levels, aspirations and at different stages in their business journey.
This program showed me a local council that’s willing to invest in its future, take some risks and grow its community.
For more information on how you can find growth solutions and encourage innovation in your business or connect with Adrian, get in touch with Loren on 0404 993 994 or [email protected].
