Blog
Insights and practical applications from the FlexPoint Consulting team around business transformation, technology modernization, process optimization, and more.
Copilot Catalyst Lesson 5: Culture is Contagious; So Is Resistance
AI adoption expert Steven McPhee discusses how direct reports follow what leaders model, so one skeptical VP can meaningfully slow down AI adoption. That's why we learned to cross-pollinate teams, share real stories, and work across departments.
Copilot Catalyst Lesson 4: You Get Three Chances to Make a First Impression
Steven McPhee shares the sobering insight that three good experiences create an advocate, while three bad experiences will create a vocal skeptic who stalls momentum across entire departments. That's why we engineer deliberate quick wins in AI adoption.
Copilot Catalyst Lesson 3: Teach People to Fish, Don't Give Them Cool Tips
Steven McPhee shares the insight that AI moves too fast for feature-based training to stay relevant, but fluency compounds forever. That's why we stopped teaching "click here, prompt this" and started teaching exploration, error recovery, and peer learning.
Copilot Catalyst Lesson 2: Sprint Beats Marathon
Steven McPhee shares practical takeaways from rolling out Microsoft 365 Copilot. This includes learning to start with a short, high-energy sprint, then pivoting to measured reinforcement.
Copilot Catalyst Lesson 1: Leaders Go First, or Nothing Goes Anywhere
Steven McPhee shares how enthusiasm cascades down from leaders’ own experimentation in Copilot adoption. Instead of a handful of high performers lobbying for a broader rollout, executives lead the charge and tell the story that keeps the investments flowing.
Enterprise Copilot Catalyst: Eight Things We Learned
Steven McPhee summarizes eight lessons learned from rolling out Microsoft 365 Copilot to a pilot group of twenty leaders. These aren’t theory or best practices. Just what actually worked.
Four Things to Celebrate Four Years
This month marks four years since starting FlexPoint Consulting. In honor of the milestone, our team shared a series of “4 things...” thoughts throughout the month of July.
What Can We Learn from a Ten-Year-Old?
Pedro Cortez reflects what we can learn from his son’s (temporary!) set-backs in Ninja competitions, including tenacity, preparing thoroughly, and resisting reacting in panic when things go wrong.
For the Love of Basketball (and Perseverance)
In honor of March Madness, Liz Pryor reflects on this season of coaching middle-school basketball. Her team navigated considerable adversity, and she saw a lot of improvement on (and off!) the court.
Silence in Discovery
What is one of the most important elements of a discovery session? Keen insights? Not quite. A bingo on the consulting jargon card? Nope. Kim Ehrman argues that it is silence, so we can give space for everyone to think and truly learn from the discussion.
Facets of Discovery
Kim Ehrman describes four key elements of FlexPoint discovery sessions, semi-structured conversations where we know the topic of interest but we truly don’t know what we’ll find out along the way.
Good Communication is Empathetic Communication
Steven McPhee shares the importance of bridging the gap between perspectives as a way to build understanding. This goes beyond communicating clearly and extends to navigating different priorities among those in conversation.
What I Learned from a Massive Hole in My House
Kim Ehrman shares details from a car running into her house and draws lessons learned for consultants and clients based on the experience.
Bridging from Digital Topics to People Implications
Kim Ehrman and Michael Daehne share questions to ask in connecting the dots between four key digital topics and their people implications. We can increase the effectiveness of technology efforts by designing them around their impact on people.
Reframing Key Business Concepts
Kim Ehrman and Michael Daehne share reframed -- and sometimes counterintuitive -- perspectives on critical business topics like integration, work-life balance, and career advancement.
Identifying and Sourcing Key Metrics to Drive Progress
Building on learnings from a recent Inflect podcast, Kim Ehrman shares how to define desired metrics vividly enough to collaborate with Analytics and IT teams to create or gain access to them.
Technology Leaders: Stop Explaining, Start Teaching
Michael Daehne argues that teaching -- rather than explaining -- big technology concepts drives more long-term success. He shares five tactics to teach ideas, including being clear on why the topic matters, identifying learning objectives, and more.
Having a Spicy Kickoff is Better than Silence
A project kickoff meeting can be boring, or it can be helpful. Kim Ehrman shares why it’s good to embrace pointed feedback plus how the FlexPoint Consulting team creates the conditions for productive heat in project kickoff meetings.
Using Root Cause Analysis to Identify and Address Single Points of Failure
Kim Ehrman uses vacation coverage examples to illustrate how we can use the “five whys” approach to understand the root causes of a challenge and address them in a proactive manner.
Making Time for What’s Important
Many of us feel like we spend a lot of time talking about work but not actually making progress toward our goals. Kim Ehrman shares how to shake up your typical ways of working and set up an almost-no-meetings week, focused on making progress.