Insurgence

[in-sur-juh-ns]

1. The act or process of permanently disrupting the existing order
2. The state or condition of being insurgent

Don't be an Incumbent...be an Insurgent

We exist at the intersection of strategy, innovation and leadership to help organisations to discover
ways to transform disruption into a source of permanent competitive advantage.

What We Do

We are a next generation innovation and strategy consultancy.

Strategy Design and Execution

In an increasingly unstable world a new approach to strategy is required. We bring fresh thinking and proprietary methods that will help your organisation create an unfair advantage. Our innovative hyper-mobilisation approach to strategy execution will help you get there first.

Innovation

In today’s environment, Innovation is critical to success. Insurgents apply innovation to reshape industry boundaries whilst incumbents stand helpless on the sidelines. Insurgence can help you harness your innovation efforts to build and sustain new sources of competitive advantage.

Leadership

The era of command and control hierarchical leadership is coming to an end giving way to a new generation of horizontal leadership approaches designed for the agile and nimble age we live in. Is your leadership team ready for this change?

Expert Facilitation

Insurgence facilitation is different. We will help you and your team rethink the boundaries, rules and assumptions that define your position in the marketplace. We will challenge you to be better. Better leaders, better competitors, better participants in the world we live in.

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How We Work

Client Enablement

Our consulting philosophy is different. We believe that in order to help our clients to achieve their goals, we have to find your best and brightest people and enable them with the skills and mindset to think and work differently.

Co-Creation

We will help you think differently about your network of customers suppliers and other stakeholders using co-creation to accelerate insight, buy-in and results.

Divergent Thinking

Our creative design process requires viewing problems in fundamentally different ways to find solutions that help our clients to leave behind embedded assumptions holding them back from achieving the impossible.

Intelligent Simplicity

The best solutions always seem simple and elegant. Achieving this simplicity requires bringing together thoughtful design with deep insights.

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Client Voices

"Matt Tice [and his team] have been with us from the beginning of our growth journey providing invaluable strategic counsel to help us grow more than 50x over five years and evolve from a small local player to a truly global enterprise operating on four continents.  Insurgence brings a unique combination of strategic insight combined with an absolute dedication to client success.  As our journey continues we will continue to draw upon the innovative and creative input that sets Insurgence apart from other advisors.”

Nigel Pollard, Chief Executive Officer, Soho Flordis International

“The Insurgence team brought us a completely fresh look at innovation and challenged our team to think in very different ways about the role of innovation in our organisation.  The unique way the Insurgence model brings innovation together with strategy and leadership was novel and insightful, but at the same time simple and easy to understand.  The depth and breadth of their knowledge on the topic was vast and helped my team break down some of our fundamental assumptions in a practical and engaging way”

Sean Ventris, Head of Legal, CSR Limited

“The team at Insurgence worked with us to develop our channel strategy at a time of significant change in our organisation.  This effort helped us think fundamentally differently about how we go-to-market, our relevance to members and the resilience of our business model. This will help us achieve the critical but difficult balance between value to our members and economic sustainability.  My team thoroughly enjoyed the process and came out of the effort with new skills that they can apply in their careers at FINSIA and beyond.  Along the way Matt Tice, in particular, has been invaluable as a leadership coach for me in my role, first General Manager, Commercial and, more recently, as Chief Executive Officer.”

Jane Endacott, Chief Executive Officer, FINSIA

I have worked with Matt Tice over nearly 15 years across four companies, each time to help me shape strategy, create alignment in the organisation and execute against very aggressive goals many people in each organisation thought were impossible to achieve.  Most recently at IDP, the team at Insurgence helped us to shape our strategy and innovate our business model as we participate in the market for the first time as a newly listed company. The “no excuses” style combined with a genuine passion for client success and results helps make Insurgence standout from other firms.”

Andrew Barkla, Chief Executive Officer, IDP

“Upon receiving a recommendation from a trusted business partner, we engaged Insurgence to help us define our winning strategy and value proposition at a critical point in our history as a company.  Insurgence gave us a new language for strategy and helped us to rapidly achieve unified clarity as a leadership team and position the business to execute on a growth strategy that will help us grow the business more than 3x in the coming three years. The Insurgence team was easy to work with and not afraid to challenge our thinking to help us get there”

Sam Bastounas, Chief Executive Officer, Axieo

"Matt Tice and the team at Insurgence helped us, at a critical time in the history of the organisation and an unprecedented time of change in our industry, to confront our role in the market as an established incumbent and to think differently about how we play and win in the future. Insurgence brought us a practical language and a simple way of thinking about strategy. Matt worked with our top 100 leaders to help sharpen our focus on current and emerging customer needs and to build buy-in and consensus on our approach to winning in our key markets. The way Insurgence worked with us enabled our internal team to build sufficient understanding of the tools and processes to take ownership and responsibility for their continued use to drive strategy through to results."

Michael Thomas, Chief Operating Officer, TAFE Queensland

"Matt is an outstanding speaker and presenter on strategy. He was able to hold the audience’s attention and give them tremendous value. Everyone took home ideas which will make their organisation’s better and more effective. If you have a chance to see Matt....don’t miss it!"

Jerry Gleeman, TEC Chairman TEC 53, KEY 106

Our Insights

The Innovation Imperative of Insurgent Companies

As the saying goes, “necessity is the mother of invention” or, said another way, “when the need for something becomes imperative, you are forced to find ways of getting or achieving it.”

Rondo Moses
September 16, 2016
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Unstable Strategy

After working for more than 20 years helping companies design and execute strategy, it is now obvious to me that strategy is undergoing a profound change. More and more as we work with clients we find that the traditional strategy methods are starting to break down. Whilst I am not suggesting that everything we have learned over this period about strategy is invalid, I am suggesting that things are fundamentally different. Much of what we learned about strategy applies to organisations operating in a relatively stable macro economic/competitive context. In a straw-poll survey of more than 350 CEOs across multiple industries taken by Insurgence in 2016, more than 85% of CEOs agreed that the environment in which they compete is highly dynamic and unstable and set to become more so over the coming years. One of the analogies often used to illustrate strategy is chess. In chess, each player occupies half of the board at the start of the game with the goal of ultimately and totally defeating the competition. This is a useful analogy because competition closely mirrors a game of chess in several important ways; there is a winner, there is a playing field (i.e., the chessboard) and the game requires a balance of strategy and tactics to create advantage. This is the essence of strategy. If I move, you countermove. I sacrifice a pawn to take your knight. You introduce a new product; I follow or counter. I enter a new market; you attack me in my home market. This all works very well in a stable system where the players are known and the rules of the game are well established. I often share this analogy with business leaders, and, inevitably, a hand goes up and someone says but that’s now how things work any more!. Of course the question itself is a trap and the discussion typically gets quite lively. What’s changed?, I always ask. The first answer is always that the game is being played by multiple players, its not as simple as the Coke vs. Pepsi battles of yesteryear, there are multiple players on the board all trying to win. Most leaders generally agree with this, but someone always argues that this has always been the case, what’s different is that it is becoming more and more difficult to determine with whom we are competing with.Usually what comes next is someone then mentions - it’s like we are playing chess on the ocean with ten foot waves!. In other words, the ground underneath the board is constantly shifting. After some more lively debate, someone almost always get to the heart of the problem with the core analogy itself –actually, the real problem is that we are playing chess, and so is our traditional competition, but more and more competitors are coming on the scene that aren’t playing chess so much as playing a totally different game, with different rules and different assumptions."
Strategy, in stable systems, does look a lot like chess. In unstable systems, if you are playing chess against someone else playing go, how would you know if you were winning? Most of what we have learned about strategy applies to the former case, not the latter. If you are still in an industry where the rules are predictable, the competition set, the assumptions static, congratulations – keep playing chess. For the rest of us, a new approach is required, our very survival depends on it.
To learn more about strategy in unstable systems, please contact us and we will be happy to share our perspectives with you.

Matt Tice
June 1, 2016
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Strategy Execution in the Age of Disruption

I have spent much of my career helping organisations to execute strategy and have found that the execution of strategy is one of the most challenging things executives can face.

Matt Tice
May 2, 2016
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Macroscopic Innovation

In a series of stand up surveys of more than 350 CEOs conducted January to June 2016, we asked about the importance of innovation, i.e., how important is innovation to your current and future success?

Matt Tice
July 25, 2016
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Customer Proximity

One of the principal characteristics that set insurgents apart from incumbents, is the close proximity to customers (and more broadly the market) that insurgents develop. Customer Proximity can be described as the mean distance from the firm to the customer (i.e., the market place).

Matt Tice
August 2, 2016
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Leadership Insurgence

One of the biggest issues facing most incumbent leaders (i.e., leaders at the helm of incumbent organisations) and well articulated by one of our recent clients, is “how do I navigate my organisation through disruption as the competitive equilibrium becomes more and more unstable?”.

Matt Tice
April 5, 2016
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Inclusive vs. Extractive Leadership

Over the summer holidays, I read an excellent book, entitled “Why Nations Fail” by Michele Boldrin, David K. Levine and Salvatore Modica. The main thesis of the book was that “inclusive” political and economic institutions have a much greater probability of long term success (i.e., are superior) as compared to “extractive”

Matt Tice
March 15, 2016
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Lessons from the 2016 US Presidential Election

Donald Trump shocked the world by defeating Hillary Clinton in the 2016 US Presidential Election. He will become the 45th President of the United States upon inauguration on January 20, 2017. While this moment is surreal for many in the global citizenry, especially for those living in the US, it should serve as a blaring siren or wake-up call for business leaders in established companies, also called incumbents.

Rondo Moses
December 8, 2016
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Achieving Greater Results with Design Thinking

As a strategy consultant for the past twenty years, I have worked for dozens of market leading companies, from family-owned enterprises in Latin America to billion dollar behemoths with global brands and operations headquartered in the US. Most of these companies have been in business for at least as long as I have been in consulting. Like most companies that have been around for decades, they have experienced periods of steady growth, in top-line revenue and bottom-line earnings, as well as periods when these indicators have taken a hit.

Rondo Moses
December 12, 2016
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Training & Events

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