COCOONERSN°0 - FEBRUARY 2016 M A K IN G I T H A P P E N

HELLO WORLDMaking sense of change

This story is about a leading Italian publishing

house, founded in 1931 and focused on economic

and legal books, products and services. The goal

of our first intervention, delivered on February

2015, was starting an evolutionary path through

a sensitive corporate phase after an important

acquisition. This path is oriented to achieving

mastery over tools and techniques that allow a

better management of complexity and variability.

Read at page 6

Our open governance: considerations, facts and results.

It’s been almost two years now, since we decided

to apply an open governance in e-xtrategy,

thanks to Cocoon Projects help and LiquidO™

contaminations. What were the results in the

last 12 months?

Read at page 4

A word about Cocoon ProjectsRead at page 10

Meet LiquidOTM

Read at page 12

OUR STORY, YOUR STORY FROM THE FAMILY: E-XTRATEGY

COOKING IN OUR LABS• Labs, what?• Ok, got it. And what do they do?

Read at page 8

Cocooners - n° 0 - February 2016

2

WHAT’S UP

CLAUDIA PELLICORI

This is the first edition of the brand new Cocoon Projects

house organ and I feel I have a great responsibility in

choosing the argument of my opening article!

What is important for me, for Cocoon and may be of

interest for others? Personal (and work) satisfaction.

There is no single formula that defines the path to reach personal

satisfaction.

The important question that we should first ask ourselves is “What

is my potential? What could I be?”. And it is not easy to answer with

honesty and openness. We are not used to find out the answers

inside ourselves. Have you really chosen your direction or were all

your steps already established?

To tell you the truth I haven’t thought too much about that for many

years and these questions have been increasingly growing.

If we spend our time and efforts trying to follow somebody else’s

idea of success, and if we keep on ignoring any message coming

from inside us, then we will finally be exhausted and discouraged.

But I tested on myself that you can achieve very good results if

you are working in a supportive environment, if you are in the

right place, if you listen to yourself, if you are fully aware of your

strengths.

Your work and your life are exactly the same thing, it is no longer

possible to split these elements. No sense being “someone” at home

and with friends and “someone else” at work.

As John Hagel wrote in his The Power of Pull:

small moves, smartly made, can set big things

in motion. We need to marry our passions

with our professions in order to reach our

potential. And be happy.

Inclusiveness: why participation makes a difference.

Dealing with companies, whatever big or small, I’m increas-

ingly convinced that managers and entrepreneurs (or business

owners) fail to see the true value in people and their incredible

hidden opportunities.

Everybody knows that human resources are important. Everyone

is saying “put people first” in the company. Everybody thinks that

corporate values should be the core driver in the growth path of compa-

nies. And off they go with coaches and trainers making people jump

on their chairs once a year. And off they go with consultants trying

to improve resource efficiency, You’ll see experts spending hours to

write pages and pages full of valuable principles and guidelines to be

read by employees in the front hall or along the corridors …

The truth is that very few companies are willing to spend their time,

money and energy investing in people and for people. They already

spend a lot of time and money, they just have to change methods

and destination.

Stop with occasional team building events (as if we were talking of

building palaces!): let’s start new processes instead, let’s get people

work together with measured profit and give them the chance to

change the rules of the game, if necessary.

Stop with meetings where someone speaks and hopefully the

others listen.Let’s turn them into open meetings where anyone can

suggest, discuss and act.

Stop with long-term business plans written by few and forgotten by

most people after a few weeks.

It’s so much better to work on short- and medi-

um-term visions and give everyone the oppor-

tunity to make a valuable contribution.

If you think your employees are not able to

do this or even worse, they can’t usefully

contribute to, I suggest you to review your

recruiting methods.

It’s definitely true: a company starts growing

when people in that company start growing.

CLAUDIA PELLICORI

MICHELE LUCONI

Cocooners - n° 0 - February 2016

3

Crowd funding campaigns: what’s the matter? Connecting

opportunities to the world wide potential consumers is

now very easy thanks to crowd funding platforms like

Kick Starter or Indiegogo.

From social networks to the disruption of business models, digital

revolution is having a deep impact on our society, bringing to light

the best but also the very worst of it.

Are you promoting your idea as a real innovative product?

Be ready and luckily you will probably find more than 10 similar

ideas. That’s digital effect.

But on the other side It’s a good thing that If you want to launch

an innovative product, you can simply try and enter your project

in Kickstarter and in a few minutes you will find out if there are

other start-ups already working on that idea and which feedback

they received from bakers all around the world.

If bakers welcome your idea, this could be a turning point for your

company as it happened in 2012 at Pebble when they received

pre-orders for 10M$ from approximately 66 thousands bakers

against a modest target of 0.1M$. A major milestone!

That is a real “customer validation” process!

A new question arises: is it so easy to launch a pre-order campaign?

No, not at all.

Your communication must be successful, you have to prepare

impressive digital contents to show your great idea.

You have to take care and be sure you’re

respecting pre-orders’ commitments and

avoiding the risk to run out of cash in your

campaign, once successful.

Especially on your first approach, all this does

require great expertise and lean execution. Well,

Cocoon Projects can be your perfect partner..

Innovation, as one of the major foundations in Cocoon’s mani-

fest, does not only concern business models, but it’s also about

professional training now.

In recent years, for example lawyer as a profession has radically

changed. Most lawyers used Latin and Greek and law firm organi-

zation was still anchored to outdated models, based on paper files

and on-site meetings.

To be competitive today means you must speak very good English,

you must perfectly know how to perform Internet and you absolu-

tely have to invest in tools, in order to achieve economically efficient

training methods. However according to recent studies at Polyte-

chnic University of Milan, Italian professionals still largely show a

conservative attitude regarding Information Technology (IT), which

is perceived more as a cost than as a real tool of improvement.

Basically the result is a passive approach to changing.

The use of IT tools is limited to email, internet navigation and to

create documents. But a new vision of law firm organization and an

active role of lawyers in the innovation process are highly icreasing

and definitely needed.

To stay competitive on the market, lawyers will necessarily have to

rely more on IT tools in the very near future.

For example by using software to catalogue and exchange informa-

tion, such as files, events and services, all meetings, emails, docu-

ments and legal expiry dates will be instantly and automatically

shared by all associates.

The informed use of innovation will help them

to save time and focus on purely legal matters

in their professional activity. More efficiency

and increased quality of services provided as a

result!

GIUSY TOMARCHIO

FABIO CALABRÒ

Cocooners - n° 0 - February 2016

SOME OF OUR 2015 HIGHLIGHTS

MAKING SENSE OF CHANGE WITH LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY™

CHANGE INNOVATION AND LIQUID ORGANIZATIONS WITH STELIO VERZERA

LIQUEFYING AN ORGANIZATION TO INCREASE AGILITY

4 WORKSHOP3 CITIES250+ PARTICIPANTS

FROM THE WHOLE WORLD

COCREATION INITIATIVES

2 EVENTS200+ PARTICIPANTS20 COUNTRIES

INNOVATION EVENTS ORGANISED

TALKING ABOUT US

20+ PARTNERS5 COUNTRIES

PARTNERS COLLABORATIONS

3

4

It’s been almost two years now, since we decided

to apply an open governance in e-xtrategy,

thanks to Cocoon Projects help and LiquidO™

contaminations. What were the results in the last

12 months?

Participation and Co-creationTrue participation is developed through exchange

of views, meetings, ideas, talks, all members with

one and only goal: aiming at convergence!

Strategic decisions mean to us how to review

business models, how to choose the right partners

to work with, how to identify stimulus plans and

how to draw up a budget. Participation means all

together to us . Everyone involved!

The most significant step in our process of change

was on biannual meeting in October, 2015.

It was our fourth meeting to define the company

vision and we had 2 days together trying to

identify where exactly we were and designing

where we wanted to go within 6 months.

Better than designing, I should properly say

building, because we actually used Lego™ Serious

Play™ (LSP) in our latest 3 sessions.

See here below one of the artifacts produced

during those 2 days, and you will find e-xtrategy

vision. That’s where exactly we want(ed) to be

within 6 months.

100/100 meetingsIntroduced by using LSP they’ve become essential

and indispensable now.

100/100 meetings means meetings where 100% of

the participants produce 100% of the results

When all participants are open members, make

their personal contribution and they are all

perfectly aligned with the final result.

Believe me: you’re experiencing an incredible and

priceless opportunity!

I think this is due to 2 main aspects:

Corporate culture: You get it by working over

years and acting with people for years.

Values: Values are essential.

No need to carve them in stones. Question your

values and recognize them.

Keep on experiencing true values in our own life.

Ritual danceSince flexible methods have been introduced

in our business practices, we have used a dozen

rituals. Daily, weekly and monthly but never fixed

and definitely regular routines.

This attitude highly contributed to our company’s

improvement and helped us to develop a new

approach (in order to adapt) to ever-changing

needs and circumstances. So here are 2 rituals we

can’t almost do without now and which give us

the best

and immediately realizable results.

1- The biannual open-governance meeting

2- Retrospectives

Real time alignmentFour new full-time employees joined E-xtrategy

this year. A few months have passed and there’s

absolutely no difference between them and the

staff who have been (working) with us for 15 years.

We are spending so much time in developing

those activities that encourage everyone in the

OUR

OPEN GOVERNANCE: CONSIDERATIONS, FACTS AND RESULTS.

Cocooners - n° 0 - February 2016

For this first number of “Cocooners” we love to feature a rewarding piece by E-xtrategy, about the work, path and passion that we’ve shared so far, and that we keep sharing.

e-xtrategy.net

FROM THE

FAMILY

company to confront each other and to take

decisions. There’s no way to escape. When you’re

at the cross road, you just have to align.

And actually there is no other chance: the

company is in fact one system made up of people

that uniquely decide where to go.

Dare to take decisionsWe faced many challenges this year, that raised

again the issue: “how to take decision”.

This is every company’s greatest fear: and what if

I’m wrong? What if I’m not up to it? What if I don’t

have all information I need to make a decision?

Thanks to our coaches’ help, the result we are all

aiming for is that “we can all decide on anything”,

We’ve been forced to take sometimes very difficult

decisions and on difficult questions, which were

once reserved to only a few people in the company.

This is why we are all growing up very fast and so

the company is.

For the third straight year, 2015 has been the best

year in our company’s history.

And yes, also in terms of euros.

This is how we enjoy doing business.

OUR

OPEN GOVERNANCE: CONSIDERATIONS, FACTS AND RESULTS.

COCOON PROJECTS

WEBSITE HIGHLIGHTS

Abstract from the full article from the e-xtrategy blog.

Read the full (and Italian) version HERE

5

Cocooners - n° 0 - February 2016

“From networks to partners”: Lego™ Serious Play™ workshop

The power of networking to succeed: from here the idea to organize a wor-

kshop on active networks with the Lego™ Serious Play™ methodology.

#EODF15: Re-imagining organisation, Re-imagining design.

The European Organisation Design Forum has been organised by us,

as Cocoon Projects, for the first time in the Mediterranean area.

#EODF15: For the first time, the masterclasses. There is less than a month and we, as Cocoon Projects,

are ready to bring the annual conference for the first time

in the Mediterranean area.

6

In order to better

describe this case,

we need to introduce

an important concept:

the Innovation Space.

It can be described as

an evolutionary terri-

tory for organisations,

driven by three main

ideas: leanness, open-

ness and inclusiveness.

They refer respectively

to how people collab-

orate,cocreate and

converse.

Even though it

may seem a very

abstract concept,

identity is intimately

connected to our

actions. It’s important

to be clear and under-

stand “who we are”

today. What unequiv-

ocally represents us,

what motivates us and

what encourages us to

strive for the better.

It can be characterized

by values, for example,

by technologies that

deeply define us, or

even by something that

Through the LegoTM

Serious PlayTM

(LSP) methodology we

encouraged them to

dive into the identity of

the company, moving

from the core identity

to what is called the

aspirational identity. In

this phase a lot of value

was created. Based

on research which

shows that this kind

of hands on, minds on

learning produces a

deeper, more mean-

ingful understanding

of the world and its

possibilities, the LSP

This story is about a leading Italian publishing house, founded in 1931 and focused on economic

and legal books, products and services. The goal of our first intervention, delivered on February

2015, was starting an evolutionary path through a sensitive corporate phase after an important

acquisition. This path is oriented to achieving mastery over tools and techniques that allow a

better management of complexity and variability.

It is in that framework

that we designed this

workshop to start a

path for all participants

to define and evolve

their group identity,

the priority action

areas, the change goals

and an operational

framework to start

working on solutions.

we definitely are not.

Examining our “core

identity” we can see

where the value of our

company comes from.

In order to achieve this,

Cocoon Projects has

chosen to start with a

serious game to help

the participants in

describing and under-

standing their shared

group identity: LegoTM

Serious PlayTM.

methodology deepens

the reflection process

and supports an

effective dialogue –

for everyone in the

organization. People

of all levels explicitly

admitted to have been

talking about issues

never raised before.

The LSP technique

helped them to explore

their mind, even their

unconscious side, and

to leverage also their

unexpressed opinions

and feelings.

INNOVATION SPACE

LEGOTM SERIOUS PLAYTM

IDENTITY

OUR STORY IS YOUR STORY

SOME DATA ABOUT ITERATION 0

MAKING SENSE OF

CHANGE

Cocooners - n° 0 - February 2016

7

We then

continued to

feed the change by

helping them extrap-

olating some new

goals and we finally

set up a strategic

Change Canvas with a

consequently complete

change structure.

Initiatives for the

resolution of the

problems identified

by each participant

were grouped

collaboratively for

macro intervention

themes and evaluated

by utility/impact and

difficulties.

The Change

Canvases and the

LSP method are “just”

techniques that can

facilitate innovation

processes and improve

business performance.

What is fundamental,

though, is the ability

to start generating a

new culture that we

could call an adaptive-

ness culture.

The selected change

areas were three, and

for each of them a

dedicated operating

Change Canvas was

built.

The canvas encour-

ages change agents

to distil the change

goal into a form that is

easy to communicate

and, yet more impor-

tant, easy to evolve or

even to throw away.

The main result is

to have activated

this approach,

enabling alignment,

leveraging and

understanding diver-

sity of perspectives

and competences,

establishing a change

framework focused

on initial priorities

and adopting new

evolutionary tools.

CHANGECANVAS

A NEW CULTURE

It is not just a matter of effectiveness

of the most relevant methodologies, it

is a question of understanding a better

way to let value flow within a specific

company, through learning and a new

level of people interactions. We need to

practice and develop the arts of collabo-

ration, cocreation and conversation.

FINAL THOUGHTS

2 DAYS FACILITATORS PARTICPANTS3 15SOME DATA ABOUT ITERATION 0

Cocooners - n° 0 - February 2016

8

COOKINGLABS

Cocooners - n° 0 - February 2016

Labs, what?In short, the Cocoon Projects Labs are our own

innovation engine. New knowledge, mastery and

even new value proposition elements are deve-

loped here.

They are open and voluntary structures, working

by specific processes designed for proactively

generating market-driven and high-quality value

proposition.

It’s in the CP Labs that entrepreneurs and profes-

sional game-changers can express their best

contribution in the co-creation of the next Cocoon

Projects.

There are three different kinds of Labs for three

different kinds of value production:

Know-how Labs for the development of high-

level professional know-how on specific topics

and practices;

Each Lab will produce different value exchange

activities more than once per year, such as insight

studies, hangouts, specific initiatives, participa-

tions to external events, and more.

Stay tuned for the

publication of all the

active Labs and their work

at labs.cocoonprojects.com

Tools Labs for the generation of mastery in the

usage of official tools for customer projects;

X Labs for the introduction and testing of new

sustainable value proposition parts or comple-

ments of the Cocoon Projects business model.

Ok, got it. And what do they do?

The three kinds of Lab have some specific diffe-

rences in the way they work. Nevertheless all of

them share some traits, like the following ones:

Anybody who takes part to the Cocoon Projects

open governance, can launch a Lab.

Each Lab will be expression both of Cocoon

Project’s core values and of market-pulled needs

and opportunities, specifically incorporating

external requests, innovation trends and themes

and opportunities detected in the work with

customers.

IN OUR

For this first number, before bringing you news about what our Labs are doing, we’d just like to tell you what to expect from them.

And of course we’d start with what they are and what they do.

In the meanwhile, we are preparing a brand new part of our website dedicated to them, where you’ll be able to follow their work and

check out how we craft the value we bring to our customers to support and energize their evolution. Stay tuned!

A Cocoon Projects Jam happens twice per year, at the beginning of each half. It is the most important CP governance event, open to all members and contributors and lasting two or three days. During the CP Jam we cocreate our direction for the next 6 months. Here below you can have a peek at our last Jam.

#CPJAM

@cosedapatsy

Are you prepared to be surprised? #cpjam weekend #2016h1

@PaulTolchinsky

@xSheRocksOn @CocoonPro @cosedapatsy cocoon on the

move, change in the wind!!!

@emagorse

It could be the perfect wave! #cpjam #2016h1 @UpSiderTweet

@Eustressland

A real open space let’s start #Jam16 #2016H1 @CocoonPro

@rogerbrufau

@CocoonPro i wish stay here greetings from Barcelona see you

in next cpjam

@xSheRocksOn

Let’s make it happen! #CPJAM #2016H1 @CocoonPro

@ShiverTweet

Deep thanks to all those who showed they understand what

#ohana means @CocoonPro #CPjam

@jacoporomei

Deep questions during @CocoonPro’s #CPJam

@ShiverTweet

#CPjam on the go @CocoonPro. The brains party just got started!

#ohana #jaiho

Cocooners - n° 0 - February 2016

9

JAM NEWS

10

Cocoon Projects’ governance system itself is

based on the Lean managements and Open

Collaboration principles. It constitutes a last

generation adaptive organisational model

called LiquidOTM that has already collected

high interest and direct interaction by some of

the most relevant international experts in the

enterprise and management innovation fields.

Cocoon Projects is thus involved first-hand in

the edge international efforts for the develop-

ment of methodologies and tools enabling the

systemic improvement of organisations.

And it is directly engaged on a regular base

by global networks of professionals in the

field, such as the European Organisation

Design Forum, the Stoos Network, the OuiS-

hare network, the Management Innovation

Exchange (MIX).

Cocoon Projects is a last generation company,

devoted to supporting innovation and fostering

real value creation in the world entrepreneurial

ecosystem. It’s been designed to be effective,

agile, open, fast and adaptive. Its Customers

are people and organisations in the need for

significant evolution within the scopes of

work methodologies, tools and techniques and/

or stakeholders end-to-end relationships.

INCLUSIVENESS

OP

EN

NE

SS

LEANNESS

Imagine the space of evolution

in these three dimensions.

A value of zero on all of

the three axes would fit

for a company from

the Fifties of the last

century.

Where is your organ-

isation today?

Where should it

be tomorrow?

A WORD

ABOUT US

Cocooners - n° 0 - February 2016

These ongoing activities within the scopes of

Innovation, together with intense and contin-

uous field operations at the side of national

and international Customers highlight Cocoon

Projects as the ideal partner for those organisa-

tions in search of sound experience within the

most core and relevant scopes of Innovation.

We believe this is the time for establishing

a whole new culture in the management of

today’s challenges for any organisation. And

we’re able to design and co-execute ad-hoc

evolutionary paths on all the vertical aspects

of this scenario.

The goal is to make this change

really happen.

11

AGILE PROJECT MANAGEMENT

SERVICE MODELDEVELOPMENT

WORKPLACEEVOLUTION

REPUTATIONDEVELOPMENT

IDENTITYAND HERITAGEEMPOWERING

CROWD-PLATFORMSIMPLEMENTATION

REAL TIMESTRATEGY MAKING

EXPERIENCEDESIGN

ADAPTIVE ORGANISATIONDESIGN

INCLU

SIVENESS OPENNES

S

OPENINNOVATION

LEANNESS

ADAP

TIV

E

ORG

ANIS

AT

ION CONTIN

UO

S

IMPROVEMEN

T

IT’S ALL ABOUTPEOPLE

In the evolution of work across

the three dimensions

of leanness, inclusiveness

and openness, we can

provide services

in these 9 different areas.

Cocooners - n° 0 - February 2016

What is LiquidO™You might have heard of a new breed of organisational models, responding

to the fast growing adaptability, engagement and collaboration needs

within modern company structures. Or you might have simply experienced

the sound problems of slowness, rigidity, bureaucracy, disengagement

along with various kinds of waste and bottlenecks that “traditional”

organisational models generate and suffer nowadays.

This is what LiquidOTM is all about: the original “liquid organisation”

model for governance, born from direct experience within Cocoon

Projects and in use in a growing number of for profit and not-for-profit

organisations willing to get liquid.

Liquefying an organization means disrupting the industrial-age driven

assumptions on which rigid structures are designed and move on to make

it adaptive, dynamic and anti-fragile. Based on lean management and

open collaboration principles, the LiquidOTM model is fluid,

meritocratic and value-driven, enabling stigmergic

behaviour and “organic” effectiveness.

Why you would want it in your organisation

Rigidly structured organiza-

tions cannot cope with the

current pace of innovation

and its complexity, let

alone exploit it. We need a

completely different mindset

and consequently new models.

And we need them to be simple

and people-centric.

This is exactly why LiquidO™

was born.

1. Real-time adaptability.

The industrial age organisational approach, where

each area is defined as a restricted group of activities coherent

to one another, has its biggest limitations in the risk to fall in fragmented,

sealed administration and culture. As the company grows, so grows the

complex ramification, branching and costs of these models. Lack of

communication, heavy bureaucracy, disastrous efficiency.

The completely different perspective realized by LiquidO™, in fact relying

on people and competences without fixed roles, provides an integrated

and adaptive business management scenario shifted to a systemic

approach, pragmatically meritocratic and inherently capable of real time

adaptability to any context. It’s just like water, some would say.

2. Better and faster information processing.

Hierarchies are a sound bottleneck both for decision making and compe-

tences evolution. Too many info to process in order to succeed. Moreover,

on the other hand, the distance between where and how in the organi-

zation strategies are created, and where and how they have to be executed

too often creates waste, lack of effectiveness or even complete failure.

Non-peer evaluation, silos and recruiting inefficiency are additional

heavy side-defects of an organizational design philosophy based on the

two illusions of control and predictability, and therefore actualized with

structural divisions between thinking and doing.

LiquidO™ is a viable and operational way to let all the brilliant people in

the company effectively emerge. Anybody can join each wave, surf it and

enrich it, so to say. And leveraging different viewpoints, backgrounds and

competences today is definitely critical to succeed in taking better and

faster decisions.

3. Engagement and spontaneous leadership.

People are key in this picture. In fact, within

LiquidO™ everyone can decide whether to

join a process or not, try, and conse-

quently determine her level by fast

feedback loops from frequent and

specific peer-reviews driven by

the actual delivered value.

Besides a natural engagement

due to continuous feedback

and consequently improving

results, within this scenario

it’s really difficult to deny

emerging problems. Within

the old way of thinking the

organizations very often

conflicts, work overload, sense

of impotence, lack of decision

power, absence of endorsement,

unfair treatment and misalignments

are among the real causes of failures.

There is much more that can be done today, if

only we let go of control, predictability and rigidity.

LiquidO™ moves structures, processes and the organization

itself away from the center, where it is assumed that people have to adapt

to them, instead shifting the focus on people and truly empowering

them to dynamically find their maximum value creation spot within

the organization, expressing leadership effectively and without fear,

naturally growing and being rewarded for this.

Read the whole LiquidO™ whitepaper. It is available in

Creative Commons at liquidorganisation.info

Cocooners - n° 0 - February 2016

12

COLLABORATIVEWORKING BOARD

REPUTATION TRACKING

CONTRIBUTIONACCOUNTING

COLLABORATIVE DECISIONMAKING

MEET LIQUIDO™