Because of his experience restructuring social enterprise activities Geof Cox is frequently asked to help organisations review their organisational structure and future development, and put in place an organisational development strategy. This can have a number of aspects:

Organisational Visioning
This is usually undertaken in a workshop discussion session, aimed at understanding what it is an organisation really does.

A mystery object

If you are under 40 you may not know what this object is...
One leading UK slide rule manufacturer made the fundamental business mistake of thinking they manufactured slide rules - they didn't! - they made pocket calculators - and when the electronic pocket calculator was developed in the early 1970s it wiped out the slide rule business almost overnight.
At about the same time a little known American typewriter and adding machine company realised that what it was actually doing was making systems to process office information. That company was IBM.
A new understanding of what you are really doing – which may be quite different from what everyone assumes you are doing – can alter your fundamental business proposition and revolutionise your whole future direction.

Organisational Development Plan
On the basis of the visioning exercise, what the organisation wants is placed in the context of market and/or funding opportunities, and a realistic assessment of its capacity for change; this is the basis for developing a written plan, often including proposals for legal/financial restructuring, to guide the next stages of organisational development.

The organisational development plan will

• discover and articulate the organisation's own aims and priorities
• relate these to opportunities in both the policy and funding environment and the broader market
• analyse their implications in terms of a range of practical organisational issues
• specify an optimal strategy or action plan to move the organisational development forward

Corporate Social Responsibility
In our book this doesn't mean the sort of CSR undertaken by big business primarily as a PR exercise - it means whole organisation change for businesses that want to implement an over-riding ethical framework for every aspect of what they do - ie. businesses that want to do social enterprise.