Organizational transformation and performance consulting
We work with you so that you can do without us.
Executives, leadership teams, management teams: three consistent, complementary offerings.
Intrinsic Performance
Performance your teams own, create and evolve, rather than performance imposed on them.
Discover →The TOTEM System
From team rituals to system-wide effectiveness across the whole organization.
Discover →Heart Head Hands Leadership
Leadership that takes shape in practice, because it lets everyone develop it.
Discover →
Fourteen practitioners, one systemic way of working
Inspiring Organizations is a consulting firm specializing in organizational transformation and performance. We work with leadership teams, executives and their management teams, in organizations ranging from a few hundred to several thousand people.
The firm brings together fourteen consultants and experts in owned performance. Each has their own areas of expertise and favorite industries. All work consistently, in the same systemic way.
François DurnezFounder and President
Thierry LhuillierExecutive advisory
Anne Varin de la BrunelièrePartner
Kaïs SanchouBusiness development expert
Hind GacimiPartner
Serge BoulotManagement and organization
My-Ha ThangFinance business partner
Catherine JohnsonManagement transformation and operational excellence
Béatrice PerrotLeadership in a VUCA world
Frédéric CimmaTrainer and Lean expert
Jean-Luc RomanoLean and operations management expert
Yannick LautrousLean and operational management
Yvane Le DotPCC professional coach, executives and teams
Catherine LemanissierHR lead
François Durnez
François Durnez founded Inspiring Organizations after a decade at General Electric, first in healthcare, then in finance.
Those years showed him what a culture of owned performance can deliver. General Electric was named the world's most admired company four years in a row (Fortune, 1999 to 2002) and the most respected for seven years in a row (Financial Times and PwC, 1998 to 2004). Products came out twice as fast as at competitors, with the same high standards from the executive committee down to frontline teams.
Twenty years of consulting, training and transformation followed, in France and internationally, working on organizational performance and leadership side by side.
They led him to two conclusions. Performance consulting remains mechanistic. It brings methods built elsewhere, which teams carry out without ever owning them. Leadership training, for its part, remains theoretical and never truly takes hold. That is the whole gap between intention and action.
The TOTEM System was born from the drive to close that gap.
- A decade at General Electric
- Twenty years of consulting and training
- More than a hundred organizations supported, across all industries
- Teaching performance at École Polytechnique, CentraleSupélec and Paris-Dauphine
- President of the French Institute for Competitiveness
- Three years as performance lead at MEDEF, the French employers' federation
Performance your teams own, create and evolve
Rather than performance imposed on them.
In almost every organization, performance is split by function. Everyone performs well within their own silo, and no one owns overall performance. An issue that straddles two departments belongs to no one, and it never gets dealt with. That is where money is lost, and it is the one place nobody observes, steers or measures.
Intrinsic performance comes from within the teams, from what they understand about the why and what they have decided about the how. It emerges more slowly than a rolled-out method, it is more demanding to achieve, and it does not disappear when you stop pushing.
Read more →What if your executive committee mirrored your teams' performance, systemically?
You lead an executive committee, or you manage managers. Your team works, and working on it does not feel like a priority.
Yet what plays out in your team shapes the organization it runs. The way it makes trade-offs, communicates and handles cross-functional issues is copied by your direct reports, all the way down to frontline teams. Realign your executive committee, and your whole organization transforms.
We support the ownership of performance within the executive committee, each team and the whole organization, systemically. It works through forty-five-minute weekly team rituals, where performance is shared and steered.
The five dimensions of the ritual are the five dimensions of team performance, and of organizational performance. That is what lets the approach scale while keeping the same language, and align the whole organization.
Tribe
- The health map
- Heart Head Hands
- Values
Orientations
- The Heading
- The scan
- The SWOT-X
Tactics
- The VOX
- The value chain
- SQCDVP
Evolution
- ECAR
- IDEE
- Lessons learned
Mid-term
- Workload management
- The project portfolio
- The project charter
★ The tool an organization starts with, in each dimension.
Leadership that takes shape in practice, because it lets everyone develop it.
There are thousands of books on leadership. We read them, we agree with what they say, and we never manage to apply them. We call this wishful leadership: you state it, and hope it happens.
The Heart Head Hands model works differently. We all have a heart, a head and hands: the three centers of leadership. There is no framework to learn before you start, which is what makes it usable from the very first session, at every level of the organization.
Discover the model →The heart
Welcome, name, connect.
The head
Clarify, decide, set a direction.
The hands
Read the signals, act.
One approach for all three offerings, in five steps
It always starts with the assessment, and every step is scoped with you. The effort shown is for a full engagement.
Tap a step to expand it.
Our clients don't come from cold outreach.
Between 2022 and 2025, 97% of our engagements came from clients who come back and bring us into their new companies. Some call us back ten years later. The rest come from executives we met in training.
“Visual management is magic.”Finance department, RATP Group (translated from French)
“Well done, big impact. Thank you for supporting the Ariane 5 and 6 program teams.”Ariane 6 program leadership (translated from French)
“We really turned what looked like a garage into a modern factory.”Management, Alstom Power (translated from French)
“Excellent. An ambitious challenge, successfully met, where everyone could get involved and commit. A great human adventure too.”HR Director, DEKRA (translated from French)
The method is published, the tools are described, and teams put them into practice.
The assessment puts a figure on what you cannot see.
It looks at both levels at once, your leadership team and your organization, and identifies the first levers. Twenty minutes is enough to know whether this is for you.