Stephen Douglass, Founder and Managing Director of Scramble Systems, spoke with Venture Café Presents host Christine Dunn about the ways he and his partners can facilitate dramatic change for companies, non-profits, and campuses.

Inspired by his background in mergers and acquisitions, corporate turnaround, and competitive gymnastics, Stephen founded Scramble Systems to help organizations re-purpose assets and human talent in order to solve core problems and achieve strategic goals. “We literally try to scramble their systems,” said Stephen.

Leveraging his past professional experience gives him insight into the details of organizational design. He often found himself working to turn a company around as quickly as possible, which would sometimes lead to employees unwittingly undermining the process during what was often a stressful situation. However, this inspired Stephen to want to work more closely with employees to help facilitate a smoother transition. As such, he and his team have piloted new techniques to help organizations make difficult decisions inclusively.

A key component of Scramble Systems’ process is the concept of an “immersion” where he and his team dive in to apply the principles, methodologies and practices they have developed over the last 6 years. “When applied across an organization or in a higher education scenario on campuses,” explained Stephen. “We are able to get these astounding results that people would see over months of effort in a matter of hours.”

One example of a campus “immersion” might be a collection of 50-100 student innovators brought together to develop a mandate that extends either across disciplines or around local and global challenges they are interested in solving. The first step is teaching them to share their ideas, or pitch, to each other. This is followed by a series of exercises designed to mentor the students in the act of creating or recruiting a team or building a product.

“The whole time we are talking them through all the significant failure points and giving them the tools and resources and mindset to work past them,” said Stephen. “All along the way we are constantly giving out best practices.”

Stephen also cites lack of emotional motivation as a potential barrier to change within organizations, even when leaders are intellectually capable of great achievement. Therefore, building self-awareness can also be a key component of his work, especially with students. Scramble Systems challenges these clients to complete psychometric graphs and exercises embedded in the immersion, giving them a language from which to understand their purpose and role. This allows them to work through organizational issues from a point of strength and self-understanding.

Related Links

More information about Scramble Systems.

Stephen’s work with Harvard University’s Innovation Lab was described here.

View the entire interview.

View highlights from the interview.