What we do

Organisational effectiveness

Strategic Alignment. Cross Boundary Leadership. Cultural Change.

Strategic Alignment

Smart strategies can help you decide what to do. It’s strategic execution that makes it happen. If you want to execute a new strategy, then you need a new way of executing. That means adapting behaviours to match the needs of the new strategy.

We help leaders and teams establish the behaviours and ways of working that underpin the organisational changes required.

We help drive change to go after opportunities or close performance gaps in the way the organisation is working. This may be helping create agreement across organisational boundaries to ensure effective programme delivery.

Cross Boundary Leadership

Inter-departmental tension and rivalry is one of the most common problems in organisations. Boundaries between organisational units quickly become barriers to executing a strategy.

Cross-boundary leadership helps break silo-thinking and create synergy throughout the organisational system. Key to success is ownership. Not permitting consultants or other managers to own the problem of resolving silos, but to tap into the intrinsic desire to improve that we all share.

At River, we specialise in designing and facilitating interventions to solve real problems of organisations. We go to the root cause to address sources of silo behaviour and find sustainable solutions.

Cultural Change

Culture means simply, “how we do things around here.” We are social animals. We respond to what we think is expected of us in a group. This is culture. An always-on “social control” system.

We help organisations to understand the culture it has today and the culture it needs to deliver on its goals. We help senior leadership identify what is and isn’t working in their existing culture. And we help them with the ways they can change it. With the right kind of cultural intervention, one will embed new ways of working that will help deliver the organisation’s strategies.

Our approach is to deal with the day-to-day behaviour of leaders and their teams. This is where culture lives. It is created by what is rewarded and punished through feedback by colleagues and by what gets prioritised by senior leadership.