the smell of the forest around me is damp and moist. my breath steam-spirals in the morning air.
i run. my lungs labour too hard. it is 2013. i am fit, and entirely unfit, all at once.
i have trained my body, for my whole life, to sprint. every sport i have participated in has been about short bursts of energy at very high intensity.
endurance is my absolute weakness. this physical reality plays out in my daily approach to life. i need to change. my life is calling me to function in a different state of being.
i strip it back to bare basics and decide to train to run 5 kilometres with ease and to slowly build this to 10 and beyond. i start working closely with liz at the positive fitness project. this simple decision, isolated at the time, turned into a transformative mental, physical, relational, spiritual and emotional adventure which turned my entire life inside out.
as liz and i traversed beaches, hills, forests, roads, rain, wind and occasional irish sunshine i came to learn that the only way to go far, is to go knowing that it will hurt, and that every single part of your body and mind, will scream for you to stop and you will need to figure out how not to stop, but instead to keep traversing.
as my body became accustomed to greater and greater levels of endurance, i chose to make the next major overhaul decision: to completely revamp the business i was leading. i wanted to build something greater than a business. i wanted to build a legacy that outlived me for multiple generations. i wanted to co-create an eco-system which would leave a lasting trace on every environment, person and space it touched.
i sketched a vision on a scrap of paper on a flight from london to dublin. i called tracey and asked her to be part of the inner circle because we’d been dreaming about growing something together since 2003. we took a huge leap of faith and employed daphne as our business development lead, not quite knowing how we would pay her, and shortly thereafter hired our very first intern, simone to get working on our very first product prototype for clients.
and so “get organised” faded, and “this is productivity” was born. we knew from the outset that “this is productivity” was an interim-placeholder-brand until we’d anchored our new identity. we spent 27 months getting ourselves as close as possible to our ideal client to understand what pain points we were really solving.
we grew from being a productivity training company, to being a change management agency, to being a technology-led deployment company, enabling people to work smarter, through the collaborative use of cloud technologies.
and so here we are at the start of 2018, growing up into a better version of ourselves.
let me introduce you to WNDYR. (pronounced: /ˈwändər/)
we are the company that understands how the world works. we are doing this to accelerate humans in work.
we have a big vision. big visions, like endurance activities take time to prepare for, train for, and master. we are thinking hundreds of years. not single digits.
to enable us on this road towards our vision, as a team, we have 7 QUESTIONS which guide our daily work:
We exist to become the company that understands how the world works, to accelerate humans in work.
We have a no bullshit guide which we consider to be our operational manual.
We provide a product/service solution to onboard teams into work management products.
We will position ourselves in a distinct way in the market and build into our 5 layers of excellence which create customer value.
To activate excellence across our five defined layers for clients.
We will build an education fund which will accelerate humans. We are starting this important work by investing time into understanding what children today want the world of work to look like in their future.
as our endurance grows as a team, we’re running marathons with clients we love. we’re watching them grow into more evolved states of being.
over the next few weeks, we’ll be unpacking our vision, our new identity and the brand, the meaning behind the name, the development of the name, our no bullshit guide, our clients and our product launch plans for later this year.
and don’t forget your favourite pair of shoes …