Magazine BEAST #16 2019

16
#Business | Human Capital
HOW TO GET THINGS
DONE IN A FAST
PACED AND CHANGING
BY ALEXANDRE
ENVIRONMENT KEILMANN
A little more than 6 months ago, Audrey Rouach Baverel (Mindstyle
Coach and Consultant) Marco Houwen (Tech entrepreneur) and Sylvain
Cottong (Economist & Futurist) launched the HOW Institute. By focusing
on the HOW, their mission is to prepare companies and their employees
for the challenges of the 21 st century while dealing with a rapidly
changing world, workforce and global competition. The three experts
met with BEAST to discuss their approach which aims at empowering
Humans in the center of today’s corporate ecosystems, by showcasing
new leadership models, Human-centric products and future-oriented
sustainability practices.
What are the main challenges faced by managers – but also
by employees – in the current corporate environment?
What’s your solution to solve them?
In today’s corporate environment managers, and employees are
more and more under pressure to deliver ever more value to the
organization. Between the fact that they are «always on» through
today’s technology and the growing demand of customers to be
more flexible and innovative, they are stuck in paradigms coming
from two centuries ago where hierarchy and order execution were
the main trigger in their workday.
Today all stakeholders in a company and in the world of work
are forced to deliver not only the work they are told to do, but
also innovative and flexible solutions on all levels, on their own
initiative. And here comes the challenge: nobody told them how
to act in this world. Neither the school system, nor traditional
corporate classroom type learning, nor the old-fashioned ways of
being managed are preparing them for this new reality.
That’s why at the HOW-Institute, we are focusing on the essence
of what makes a company innovative and a learning organization:
scalable & agile learning!
We see learning not only as a way of handling a feel-good training
budget with a company, but rather as the cornerstone of a futuredriven
and sustainable organization, that recognizes that the way
it manages knowledge largely contributes to build and develop its
intellectual capital and essence of value. We are a partner for
developing together with our customers their tailor-made learning
strategy, allowing them to create and implement habits, processes
and tools for an ever more innovative workforce to become
implicitly more creative whereby improving overall organizational
performance.
What are the main components of the services
delivered by the HOW Institute?
At the HOW Institute, we help our clients design
and implement a tailor-made and agile learning
strategy according to their organizations’ needs
and context, on the path to a sustainable and
innovative learning culture, to stay on top of the
game in more turbulent economic and societal
times.
We take scalable learning really seriously and
consider it as the most important competitive
advantage today and even more so in the near
future, and we will apply design thinking and
user experience methodologies throughout our
work and processes, to systematically redesign
work environments with the primary design goal
of accelerating learning and thus performance
improvement.
In other words, we guide organizations and
individuals to develop and strengthen their
innovation skills to deliver steadily more customer
value, in self-organizing teams that collaborate
together in an interactive network, whilst providing
an outstanding workplace experience.
We typically walk with our clients through
the following phases:
• Audit & exploration phase
• Strategy development
& learning system blueprint
• Deployment assistance
• Awareness workshops
BEAST MAGAZINE #16
Marco HOUWEN
Tech entrepreneur