CLIENT
Ensto is an international technology company and a Finnish family business founded in 1958. As the company entered a new stage of growth and began implementing a renewed business strategy, its leaders faced an important question: how could Ensto’s strong culture support the company in moving forward?
The company’s legacy was deeply connected to its founder, Ensio Miettinen, and many of the values and ways of working developed during Ensto’s history remained visible in the organisation.
Co-founders was invited to help Ensto’s leaders understand that culture more deeply and explore what should be carried forward and what might need to evolve.
CHALLENGE
A strong culture can be one of a company’s greatest strengths. During major transitions, however, it can also contain assumptions and ways of working that are difficult to see from inside the organisation.
Ensto therefore needed more than a description of its existing culture. Its leaders needed a way to reflect on what the organisation had inherited from its history, what continued to create value and what might need to change as the business moved in a new direction.
The central question became:
What should Ensto carry forward from its legacy, and what needed to evolve for the company to succeed in its next chapter?
PROCESS
Instead of beginning with a conventional culture survey, we approached the question through fiction.
Writer and dramaturg Riikka Ala-Harja interviewed Ensto’s CEO Hannu Keinänen and wrote a fictional short story inspired by the company and its culture. The story did not describe Ensto directly. Instead, it created a parallel world through which people could recognise, interpret and question familiar patterns from a different perspective.
More than 70 Ensto leaders read and interpreted the story, connecting its characters and events with moments in Ensto’s history, established ways of working and attitudes and values they recognised in everyday organisational life.
Their interpretations created rich qualitative material that we analysed to identify recurring cultural patterns and tensions. These insights were brought back into leadership conversations and workshops, creating a shared language for discussing aspects of Ensto’s culture that might otherwise have remained implicit.
WHAT CHANGED
The process gave Ensto’s leaders a new way to see and discuss their own culture.
Rather than defining culture through predetermined categories, the fictional story allowed people to project their own interpretations onto an unfamiliar situation and then reflect those interpretations back onto Ensto. The resulting insights helped make previously implicit cultural assumptions more visible and created a foundation for discussing what should be preserved and what might need to develop as the company implemented its new strategy.
As President and CEO Hannu Keinänen described the experience:
“It was almost mind-blowing to get to work with the writer Riikka Ala-Harja on the short story inspired by Ensto’s culture… I believe it was an eye-opening process and it gave a tool for our people to talk about Ensto’s culture and about the points that might need further development.”