Waves of Innovation

TidalShift emerged from our twin origins in Management Consulting and Learning & Development. At each stage, we developed new approaches and new content to address the fundamental challenges facing our clients in business, government and not-for-profit sectors.

From Project Management to Leadership & Team Development

SPM was founded in 1991 as the Strategic Project Management Group, a consulting firm contributing to the early development of project management practice.

To help our clients gain the PM capacity they needed to get things done, we soon began providing training in project management. We became known as the go-to PM people.

We rapidly realized that mastering recipes for managing projects is not enough to make them successful. The people factor kept cropping up. So in the late 1990s, we responded with a new Leadership & Team Development line of business geared to helping people get things done by working better together.

Inventing Strategic Initiative Management

There is a big difference between managing a project successfully and actually executing on strategy to deliver targeted business outcomes.

This strategy/execution gap was unaddressed by contemporary PM theory. PM practice didn’t start with the C-suite and deliver visibility, accountability and control back up to the top.

To close the gap, we founded the new discipline of Strategic Initiative Management in 2007.

SPM Learning Breaks Out

To meet the growing demand for transformational development, we set SPM Learning up as separate entity in 2008.

The Rising Tide: Organizational Resilience

Our focus on providing Development That Actually Works™ for individuals continually led us to confront larger organizational issues.

No person is effective just on his or her own. To develop an individual, it’s equally vital to develop the whole.

This necessity takes on new urgency because of today’s volatile change and the pressure to do ever more. The top team needs to mobilize its people without getting bogged down by the sheer weight of the organization.

The pressures of change and performance impact every part of the organization. Leadership is no longer simply top-down; it’s also bottom up and outside in. Change is a constant that needs to be mastered technically and emotionally. Initiatives and projects are no longer special cases; they’re the daily bread of survival and progress.

The pressures of change and performance call for a new approach to development – one that’s both strategic and pragmatic. One that leads to clearly defined, measureable results. One that delivers overall organizational resilience.

As we built new programs and approaches to address these new realities, we realized that we had changed along with the world around us. To mark this change, and clarify our purpose, we changed our name to TidalShift in 2014.