The vast majority of transformations fail
There is another way...
BreathingBusiness helps design and deliver another way to transform – a way built on the understanding that any business transformation requires a human transformation. With deep expertise in human transformation and approaching it as an integrated dimension of business transformation, we co-create and implement solutions that have both immediate and lasting impact for your organization and people.
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Assess, Build, and Sustain your transformation
Do you have an integrated approach to the human dimensions of your business transformation? Few organizations do. Often we don’t realize the waste of human capacity – in time, effort and energy – can be measured and made visible. Others have challenges in turning their insights into actual, lasting change. And some invest in building people’s competencies, but struggle to implement and sustain the change.
There is another way to transform your organization and culture. BreathingBusiness partners up with you and your team to co-create, design and deliver our well-tested, well-proven approach that puts equal focus on Assessing, Building and Sustaining Transformational Capacity – your people’s capacity to remain resourceful, relevant and resilient even in the face of uncertainty.
Our Assess-Build-Sustain approach flows throughout all our services and solutions to ensure we unlock your organization’s potential and manifest greater impact, setting your organization up to a virtuous spiral of expanded levels of performance, health and impact.
One organization. One approach.
In BreathingBusiness we consistently follow our tried and tested approach in what we design and deliver.
Click to explore: 1. Assess, 2. Build, and 3. Sustain
Seeing the invisible, turning waste into value
The inner game defines the outer game
Everyone and every day matter
The Assess, Build, Sustain approach flows throughout all our services and solutions to ensure we unlock your organization’s potential and manifest greater impact, setting your organization up to a virtuous spiral of expanded levels of performance, health and impact.
Ten Steps of Transformation®
How do you turn challenges into opportunities ahead of competition?
We accelerate your transformation using The Ten Steps of Transformation. The Steps builds on and combines insights from neuroscience, sociology, psychology, system thinking, change management, learning and transformational theory – all to help you and your organization align to a higher meaning, build a more expansive mindset and the ability to manifest lasting impact immediately.
Profound and practical, the Ten Steps are simple (but not easy). Relevant for everyone in your organization, from shop to top floor.
As you transform your life, you will transform your business.
Step One: It Starts with Me
Do you ever want people or situations to be different than they are?
One of life’s hardest lessons to learn is that we can only change ourselves. The good news is that when we change, things around us will change. Equally, we are influenced by others. We are always impacting and being impacted by the interactions and exchange around us. Conditioned by norms and behaviors of society, colleagues, parents, friends.
Becoming aware of what belongs to us and what belongs to other people is needed to take ownership for what is ours.
When we fully embrace that our business will not transform unless we transform, we have taken the first big step of insight into the world of transformation.
In Step One, you learn to empower yourself to own your life and initiate your transformation without waiting.
Step Two: I Accept who I Am
Do you ever want to be different than you are?
As paradoxical as it sounds, you can only change by becoming more yourself, not by trying or pretending to be someone you are not. When you use ‘I should, must or ought to’, trying to change to fit an ideal, it becomes harder for you to step into who you really are.
You only profoundly change when you allow yourself and other people to be as you and they truly are. So only when we as human beings - and as businesses - face who we are are we able to transform with higher speed and ease for the benefit of ourselves and our organizations.
In Step Two, you learn to accept yourself and reduce the waste of pretending and defending, slowing you down.
Step Three: I Strive for Meaning
Do you sometimes find yourself exhausted rather than excited?
As soon as we, as human beings have our basic human needs of safety, belonging, and self-worth met, we can begin to strive for a deeper meaning or purpose in our lives.
When you personally reach true enjoyment, you combine what you love doing (following your passion) with how you contribute to other people (following your purpose) in a balanced way. Work starts flowing effortlessly for you.
When your personal purpose aligns and connects with that of your business, you contribute to what matters most to your business. You give as you receive. This strengthens your place and belonging in your organization. When you release your discretionary effort flowing from passion you will peak perform in your business.
In Step Three, you learn to enhance your value creation by matching your purpose and passion.
Step Four: My Mindset Matters Most
Do you occasionally look upon situations with fearful eyes?
Your preferred mindset will have a significant impact on how you see other people and yourself and the level of ownership you take in your life. You are either in a mindset of love or a mindset of fear.
The mindset you hold will determine how you experience life and the value or waste you create also at work. No matter what mindset we come from, we can all with focused effort evolve our mindset. It is not our gap that matters but our ability to close that gap quickly. When you learn how to step through fear to love, your life will be hugely enriched. The same holds true for businesses.
In Step Four, you learn to build your awareness around your mindset and how it makes you stuck or move with flow.
Step Five: I am Free to Choose
Do you sometimes lose your temper or ‘check out’ because a situation or someone triggers you?
When we feel we have little or no options, we react as we normally do; our habitual mindset is running us rather than we are running it.
We choose our response to everything that happens to us. When we embrace the big idea that we choose the mindset we hold moment by moment, we gain more freedom into (how we experience) our life and our company. Instead of wasting moments nagging about problems – we let it go - and instead we focus on the value we can bring to any moment. We might not have a choice around our context, but we always have a choice how we respond to it.
In Step Five, you learn to free yourself from prison hood, choosing a response with a positive and high impact.
Step Six: I Learn Every Day
Do you ever hold yourself back from trying something new?
As human beings, we are pulled between our desires to feel safe and to grow. We have an enormous capacity to constantly learn and need for growth and fulfillment which is found outside our comfort zone. To do this, it requires us facing our fears and our needs for safety, to belong, and to feel self-worth that would otherwise drive us to choose the safe path. In fear, we limit learning and only use a fraction of our capacity.
Instead, when you dare to explore your own capacity – seeing every day and every piece of feedback as a learning opportunity – you will go places where you have not been before; personally, and professionally.
In Step Six, you learn to turn any moments into learning moments, including harvesting all the value in failures.
Step Seven: I Manifest Impact
Have you ever made a New Year resolution or a promise to yourself that you did not keep?
Making a change in life is difficult, even when it is a positive one! What we have done has served us well up until now. It feels easier to return to old behaviors and habits with familiar rewards. Yet, we need to acknowledge when what has brought us here does not serve where we want to go.
The only way for us to make a sustainable change is to practice, practice, practice; until it becomes a habit. When it becomes a habit, it slowly becomes part of our DNA – who we are.
When we as humans and as a business, practice a ‘customer-first-habit’ by consistently asking the question; ‘How will this serve our customers?’ – it becomes part of the culture and customers will soon experience the difference.
In Step Seven, you learn to practice building healthy habits to raise and sustain your impact.
Step Eight: We listen to Serve the whole
Do you assume you know what is needed?
Sometimes we listen from a place of protection, reacting to issues jumping fast into fixing mode. We listen to people to reply and make our point, not to understand what is really going on.
We can also listen with curiosity, listening actively to understand. We listen to what has happened in the past identifying what you want to build on for the future. We listen to apprehend the root causes of the challenges.
The process of listening to understand requires us to pause, connect and reflect, slowing down before you speed up. Rather than providing answers, we ask questions that help us understand what is needed now To serve the whole - allowing the transformation to flow, flourish and function.
In Step Eight, you learn to listen - to the past, present and future - to create a balanced focus for your further actions.
Step Nine: We Learn to Solve Sustainably
Do you find yourself doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting a different outcome?
Organizations must calibrate and accept current reality to make a change. When we start wanting it differently than it is, the organization becomes stuck or the transformation stops flowing. Instead, face your current reality, zoom out and look at your business from a different perspective. Taking in all the input you have understood by listening deeply to relevant stakeholders.
Most of our challenges are at their root self-imposed and internally created. As we learn to change our mindset, solving problems sustainably becomes much easier. When we are willing to let go of behaviors, assumptions, mindsets and habits that no longer serve us, we learn to turn previous business challenges into opportunities.
In Step Nine, you learn to solve your complex business challenges and turn them into opportunities.
Step Ten: We Act to Manifest Impact
Do you sometimes avoid conflict, seeking harmony rather than healthy tension?
Despite understanding what stakeholders want and seeing how to turn business challenges into opportunities, it might still be difficult for us to act on the insight. Many transformations fail when it comes to consistently making it happen. They never manifest the impact they set out for.
Successful transformations require that we constantly listen and integrate the interest of all stakeholders balancing multiple needs and perspectives. As unpleasant as it might feel, healthy tension in life and business keeps us in balance. Doing that and speaking up if we notice imbalances that are holding us back brings enormous value to the company.
Consistency in our actions with sufficient consequences when we are not progressing as planned reduces the risk of returning to old mindsets and behaviors.
In Step Ten, you learn to act with consistency - allowing no way back in transformation.
There is another way...
Over the past 20+ years of co-leading transformations in multinationals across a variety of industries, we’ve identified several rootcauses why organizations and businesses are unable to release their full capacity, and so often fail in their transformations – and we’ve found another way to meet these challenges:
Aligning the WHAT with HOW and WHY
Most Transformations, digital or otherwise, focus on the what of transformation: the processes, strategy, and structure. BreathingBusiness focuses on the often overseen, invisible and intangible, the how and why of transformation: people, culture and purpose. We complement your team – whether internal or other consultancies – as we enable the what to flourish, avoiding fading or failure.
Seeing the invisible – a critical part of culture
Addressing culture to power transformation requires more than looking at what’s visible – such as behaviors, policies or internal communications. We need to address the invisible element that can hold the organization back – tackling causes of fear, resistance, limitations and defensiveness. To ensure culture positively impacts engagement, productivity, product solving capacity and innovation, we systematically address all four dimensions of culture – the visible and invisible, the individual and collective.
Mobilizing your entire organization
We believe in and practice co-creation. Tapping into the collective wisdom of and engaging in a two-way exchange with your entire organization. We ask the critical questions – listening to what is said and what is left unsaid – to create and implement the simple solutions that meet your needs and engage and mobilize the capacity of the full organization, from the shop to the top floor.
Facilitating Transformational Learning
Traditional learning and subjects, such as math, marketing or management, aren’t enough for solving our new, complex and non-linear challenges. In solving today and tomorrow’s challenges, we need to prioritize Transformational Learning to shift our mindsets and build in-depth understanding of ourselves and others – allowing us to recognize patterns, solutions, systems and interdependencies that went unnoticed before.
The Heart Revolution
Written by our founder, Karen Tobiasen, The Heart Revolution is a profound and practical guide for business and personal transformation that provides the foundational framework of the BreathingBusiness approach.
Standing at the intersection of personal and professional life, it equips you to create immediate and lasting impact in your life, work and society by inviting you to walk and explore the Ten Steps of Transformation through real stories and practical exercises.
Sign-up to our pre-order mailing list (no payment details necessary) and be the first to know when the book is released this fall.
