About

In 2013, the Board of OLIVE LEAF Foundation commissioned Symphony™ to research the root cause of business success, survival, and sustainability. The objective to strengthen our corporate donors’ foresights, our business partners’ commercial diligences and co-creators’ effective community services to beneficiaries. The research has continued for 6-years and yielded a fully integrated model supported by academic research publications, consultancy articles, business results and corporate literature -- all relating to cause-and-effect.

OLF provides some 200 supporting templates, detailed architectures and consultancy offerings. Our intentions are to move Symphony™ into the public domain as an open source asset where academic inputs and enhancements may keep the model current and relevant.

Solution-centric

Positioning the organisation is key element in gaining competitive advantage. We devise means of differentiation to increase chances of selection; we brand and provide markets with information and messages; some will even go as far as writing a value proposition before knowing what they intend selling. Walk through a different approach with Symphony to develop your own bouquet comprising Product, Service and Offering by following defined Threads that should unsettle the competition with something they will struggle to respond to: authenticity, relevance and creativity.

Solution-centric

Open Source

Introducing more than 50 dynamic concepts, Symphony provides some great game changers for companies willing and committed to push their thinking to the furthest boundaries. To begin, an integrated business should reveal four comprehensive layers of structure: Themes, Threads, Models and Architectures; the very same layers required at the frontline for a company to define its Product, Service and Offering. Here is an extract detailing the use of TTMA.

To the Executive

Make things more understandable to those around you, place a detailed, logic and functional model before them so that they too can follow your roadmap and thinking. Symphony provides Themes to light your pathway towards Survival, Success and Sustainability. Without the assistance and guidance of suitable architectures based on causal theory, your organisation will experience great difficulty with context, consistency, decision-making, alignment with purpose, and avoiding traps. Symphony provides numerous Threads to guide integration. Your thinking model will become authentic as your teams develop Strategy, align Resources and create a Value Network to support flagship relevant offerings.

To any entrepreneur:

Symphony™ provides a paradigm shift in thinking about your venture, equipping you with business fundamentals found in organisations that succeed, survive and sustain their efforts over the long run.

To any business owner, partner:

Symphony™ provides a paradigm in holistic thinking by prioritising business imperatives and proposing market solutions at various Life-cycle stages, and any phase of development.

To any donor:

Symphony™ provides an assured overview that scrubs fundamental principles and elements found in successful solutions and adaptive organisations. It equips any co-creating organisation with an outcomes-driven competency to evaluate programs and guide performances to reliable results.

Synopsis

Why is it that some organisations, brands or individuals competing in the same industry under the same terms and conditions (economic knowledge) may perform differently, even to the extent where one fails dismally and the other succeeds beyond expectation?

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Strategy

Forget about strategic planning, after decades you should now realise it is an impractical exercise. Rather invest your organisation’s effort in an alternative that will shape the future and provide some out-of-the-box thinking. You will be pleasantly surprised by what a dose of holistic thinking can deliver. It is time to bite into Strategic Thinking and getting the intelligentsia to apply their minds.

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Model Protocol

Academic research provides the primary source of information, followed by business literature that indicates a research methodology, and by research consultancy firms documenting client-aggregated findings. At first sight, it seems as if much research work says and indicates something different to the next; but on closer investigation project scopes, approaches, or points of interest are seldom the same, thus yielding different emphasis but not necessarily a different outcome. The contextual findings are thus staggeringly supportive of one another, but remain hidden from audiences as the authors only a result that must be authentic. It is up to the audiences and readers to form their own consolidated impressions or models over a period of time, to test research results and inputs against such models, and to develop a technique that differentiates good theory from misleading theory.

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Outcomes-centric Processes

You may have the best and treasured Resources, but without the triumvirate of Values, Processes and Resources your organisation is missing out on peak performance, equipping your offerings, building great value ecosystems and networks and most of all, a multiplier effect that elevates your ability and resilience to compete in fierce market segments.

View the model here ...

Authentic and Original

Our philosophy to serve widows, orphans and needy communities extends to enabling our business partners and other community organisations develop their own Outcome models, furthering their chances to Succeed in business, Survive competitive onslaughts and Sustain peak performances.

Value add

Over the past 20 years, our Foundation has experienced significant declines from corporate funding sources. On closer investigation, we discovered that declining funds were not attributed to our non-performance, but rather to exogenous factors:

  • New markets were being established at an astonishing rate, churning customers and revenues from established incumbents to new market entrants;
  • Market leaders and champions of industry were being removed by entrants by radical and novel products, services and offerings, unanswered by incumbents;
  • The majority of innovations took market leaders by total surprise; incumbents were too slow in response and ultimately could not prevent churn in market share;
  • Competition is more severe and devastating than ever before, he who collaborates gets to market sooner with more authentic, relevant and creative offerings to attract mainstream customers;
  • Challenges are no longer identifiable at a technical product-level (simple comparison), but catapulted by adaptive business models (complex, incomparable);
  • Incumbents are forced to flee their market segment or fight an unsustainable structural change that cannot be implemented fast enough to mitigate material losses;
  • Strategic planning conducted by Vision, Mission and Objectives provides no advantage in a complex business ecosystem;
  • Business managers are at a loss to interpret early signals of change and live in constant fear of blindsided attacks by capable and effective competitors.