Biomimicry Consultancy
A biomimicry consultant is not only a consultant in strategy and management methods, but someone who starts from the challenge inside your organisation. In other words: we work to measure. And we work from natural principles such as trust, generosity and facilitation.
Our consultants have one thing in common: they give intuition room. Seeking connection, thinking creatively and innovating are in their genes.
We have no standard answer to your question. Getting to the bottom of your situation is what we do first. Every organisation is unique, so we look for a solution that fits you and yours. Through our expertise and our continuous education we can promise you a smooth process with the result you are after at the centre of it.
All our consultants have many years of experience, often from line positions in established companies. They can put themselves in your shoes.
What do we ask of you?
We ask you for an open mind. Our philosophy often means asking managers to sit on their hands for a while. Working bottom-up calls for patience in the early stages — but once the group is moving, all that ‘lost’ time is made up again.
Approach
Depending on your brief, we go deeper with you and your staff to understand the drivers underneath the question. We call this the exploration phase. What it produces is an analysis of the problem and a plan of approach.
The next step is agreeing the overall design with senior management: what is the intended goal? Once that phase is complete, staff are involved in building the prototype and working the goal out in more detail. As a final step, staff set down in a playbook who does what, when and how. Each phase has an end product that senior management assesses. That way you keep your grip, while staff are directly involved from the very first moment — which keeps motivation high and sees resistance fall away.
We work with proven techniques too, of course: brown paper sessions, lean analysis, process flows and so on. What we do differently is involve your staff from the outset, so that they determine how the road is travelled and at what pace. There is more about this approach in the book Firm of the Future 3.8: the resilient organisation.
What makes the difference?
We make the difference by bringing pace to the process while keeping people motivated. That combination is why our change programmes do succeed. We make sure that changing is enjoyable.
We hope our approach appeals to you, and would be glad to get in touch to discuss working together.
Who we are
We work with experienced people who have built their knowledge and skill in practice over many years. Alongside them we work with experts and with curious people who bring their own value to an assignment.
Els Martijn, Founder of Biomimicry Consultancy
I have more than twenty years of experience as a director, manager and project and programme manager on change programmes and sustainability questions, at organisations including SVB, ProRail, hospitals, public bodies, energy companies and manufacturers. Trained originally in finance, I am now a generalist, which shows in my work as a strategic change manager and sustainability expert. I have practised biomimicry since 2011. I am a tax specialist and accountant, hold an MBA, and graduated in 2006 as Master of Change Management at the VU in Amsterdam. Applied biology, chemistry and physics are my passion. As an author I have written two management books on change management and the organisation of the future. I speak regularly and give masterclasses as a visionary in sustainability and organisational science. I am also a volunteer guide at Burgers' Zoo. Would you like to get in touch? You can reach me through the contact page.