Behind the scenes Nami : start up ways
When Consulting Meets Startup Agility: Nami's Recipe for Innovation
In our first article, we shared how the AI era pushed us to rethink our consulting profession, down to its business model. Today, we're lifting the veil on another major source of inspiration: startup methods.
Why? Because where innovation and agility reign supreme, we've drawn ideas to build a different kind of consultancy. Less rigidity, more autonomy. Less hierarchy, more responsibility. Less heavy processes, more agility.
Here's how we apply these principles daily at Nami Consulting.
💡 An "open architecture", because innovation never happens in isolation
allies and expertise relays to go faster and further. Startups exchange with each other, work together (even between competitors) and foster cross-sectoral partnerships.
So we've adopted these big ideas:
We regularly exchange with incubators or accelerators (Village by CA, Bivwak, Station F...) to follow innovation trends at the right pace & anticipate our clients' market evolutions.
Facing growing complexity, and aware that we cannot be experts in all domains, we cultivate an ecosystem of trusted specialists (AI, coaching, Lean Management...) who can be mobilized to enrich our value proposition: these are partners who do amazing things so we learn from them and when we think they could be useful to our clients (even without us!), we connect them.
Our "Open Innovation" approach is embodied notably in our "Nami Council of Sages": former colleagues, clients and partners who challenge our vision and nourish our reflections, in service of our clients. These are people who have done things before us, and brilliantly! They impress us with their expertise and experiences and above all: they know how to tell us bluntly if we're going in the right direction or if we're completely wrong!
🧪 A permanent "Test & (fail &) Learn" culture for maximum agility
At Nami, we consider failure as a key ingredient of success: inspired by startups, we apply the "growth mindset" not only to our client offerings, but also to our internal operations:
Lean consulting, field version: We launch our offers as "MVPs" (Minimum Viable Products) – in short format, tested, iterated based on real client feedback. We prioritize experimentation speed over first-draft perfection.
Data-driven down to the intuitive: Every launch, whether it's a LinkedIn campaign or a commercial approach, is subjected to A/B tests: different hooks, varied formats, publication times... Decisions are made based on results, not intuition.
Accelerated feedback loop: After each mission, each training, each micro-format launch, we organize an "express retro" with clients and the involved team: what worked, what needs to change, what should be stopped. Learnings are directly reinjected into improving our offers and processes.
👍 Empowerment: encouraging autonomy and cultivating initiative
In startups, responsibility, trust and the right to initiative are the true drivers of performance that allow revealing everyone's potential and unleashing entrepreneurial spirit. So, at Nami, empowerment isn't an HR buzzword, it's a structural choice that unleashes each consultant's potential:
The AutoNami triangle: each consultant is encouraged to make their decisions without asking for prior validation if their reflection takes into account the 3 dimensions of the AutoNami triangle: impact for the client, impact for the consultant and impact for the firm. If after reflection, the decision is still motivated: it's a go (no need for triple validation to launch a new initiative).
The "red cheeks policy": any initiative must answer a single question "Can I tell my colleagues what I did without blushing?" If the answer is "yes" then it was a good initiative.
Full transparency, from top management to the most junior: All OKRs, KPIs and key results are shared with all employees. We don't hide subjects, successes like errors are collectively analyzed. This transparency also pushes everyone to take ownership of issues and dare to propose.
🎓 "Growth hacking" applied to recruitment to attract, engage and retain the best profiles
We aim to create a candidate experience as differentiating as our missions, so that each encounter is an opportunity to reveal our DNA:
Talent attraction: Creating and sharing content embodying the Nami spirit, interventions in top schools to strengthen awareness and dynamic sourcing via recommendations from our personal and professional networks
Immersive candidate experience: A "Nameeting" to discover the team, exchange with consultants and understand our culture before making their choice. We certainly look for skills but we give significant weight to "fit" during all exchanges
Accelerated skill development: Each new Nami is immersed, from the beginning, in a concrete project (client or not). We favor rapid immersion via an Onboarding process (also called "l'Embarcadère", to continue the metaphor...). The development of autonomy relies on a permanent feedback culture, "official" times and a tailor-made training path adapted during our quarterly reviews.
This manual isn't a copy-paste recipe from startups. It's our way of transforming best practices into a tailor-made culture, designed for today's consulting challenges.
For us, taking inspiration from startup methods means accepting to never remain static: it's moving forward in small steps, accepting the imperfection of the first draft, pivoting while listening to the market, breaking down silos and giving power to those who do. At Nami, this energy shapes a culture of permanent movement where we learn as fast as we act.
By cultivating this "startup state of mind", we continue to reinvent our profession — and always, keep the door open to all new ideas, even (and especially) the most unexpected ones.
Actually, we're pushing the idea to the limit by participating in the development of a startup but shh 🤫 we'll tell you more soon...
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Consulting is in motion. And we move forward, one step at a time. Sometimes sideways. 🏃♂️🕺