LONDON — May 6, 2022 — Headspring, the joint-venture between the Financial Times and IE Business School, today announced the launch of a new suite of bespoke consulting services, Headspring X.
Devised to help businesses integrate learning and development within their core strategy, the solution meets the needs of clients with different levels of L&D sophistication. The launch comes as the company consolidates its footprint in the executive development market after growing nearly 60% in Europe and the Middle East last year.
The cost-benefit ratio of L&D has always been difficult to measure. While investment in people is always valuable — helping with business innovation, as well as the attraction and retention of talent — aligning L&D efforts to a strategy, as well as measuring and understanding the impact that L&D investments have on business performance, are harder to manage.
Headspring X offers bespoke solutions to enable clients to align their L&D practice to business needs more effectively, allowing businesses to identify deep-rooted performance gaps, instill innovation, and create a program of tailored learning experiences that can deliver quantifiable results.
“One of the key reasons why certain L&D initiatives don’t lead to change is the fact that decision makers often jump to conclusions about what their team needs,” says Malek Adjerad, Director of Learning Design at Headspring who has over 25 years of experience in L&D and works with organizations globally to co-create leadership development programs.
“This happens because businesses tend to address the most visible problems, but, too often, these problems are merely the symptoms of more complex issues. If you try to identify learning needs with a pre-defined solution in mind, your diagnosis will inevitably be biased. The most effective way to create the right learning solution is to start with a blank canvas and conduct a deep assessment of the organization’s learning needs — and this requires methodology.”
Built upon the foundation of Headspring’s discovery and design approach as well as the experience of working with organizations globally, Headspring X has been created to help businesses with more diverse and complex L&D needs. Working at a strategic level, Headspring X is a flexible, truly bespoke solution that will work to meet the unique needs of each client. And it begins not with problem-solving, but problem identification, helping businesses to discover where and why their L&D solutions are falling short, and how these issues can be successfully remedied.
Gustaf Nordbäck, CEO of Headspring comments: “Until this point, Headspring has been all about helping businesses to co-create the customized learning journeys their employees need to succeed. Our clients have seen transformative results from our programs, particularly when they already understand both their objectives and what they need to do to attain them, but not all businesses are in that position.
“While Headspring will continue to provide tailored L&D programs, Headspring X is a new service created to support those businesses who are unclear about what their needs are as well as those with more complex needs. We are on a mission to help companies who are struggling to identify why their L&D solutions aren’t providing the results they need and those looking for unbiased advice on what areas of development they should invest in and prioritize.”
Targeting companies across all industries, Headspring X is a hybrid L&D service delivered digitally and face-to-face, in English, Spanish, German, and French.
About Headspring
Headspring is a joint-venture between the Financial Times and IE Business School established in 2015. Founded on the principle that executive development needs to be collaborative, relevant and measurable, Headspring’s purpose is to design a new and more relevant approach to executive development that would be fit for the challenges and business environment of the 21st century.
