Company bio

Laurens van Piggelen, managing partner at Adapt Innovatie, strives to have the right people in the right positions, in different fields. It’s all about two things: innovating people and helping an organisation in the right direction on a strategic level.

Adapt Innovation’s ultimate dream is that companies will no longer need them and that Laurens can literally put his feet up.

Modern Projectmanagement

We spoke extensively with Laurens about Adapt Innovation, his motivations and his vision on Modern Project Management.

Legs on the table, sounds attractive. How do you want to be expendable?

“What you ultimately want in a company is to ensure that people do what they are good at. If this is set up structurally at the start, it will eventually be a well-oiled machine and things will run smoothly. We only help companies. That may be with a strategic session or looking at a part of the implementation. The guarantee is very important here. We can also help them on their way so that the organisation itself eventually knows what it will need in the future. This also applies to our own people, by the way. If we grow as an organisation, we will look at who will do what. We apply modern project management for this. It is important that things are adapted and/or improved for the growth of a company. Adapt Innovation strives for growth. Growth comes before profit at Adapt Innovation. For the most part we look at the soft skills of people. Eighty percent is in whether you have people who can grow and want to grow. That’s much more decisive than someone’s background or education.”

 

You monitor how people feel every week. Why?

“You want to know what is going on with the people. That is why we send out an Askemo every Friday morning. Askemo is a low-threshold feedback tool that gives you real-time insights into employee satisfaction and allows you to evaluate during the process. It is a recurring feedback moment, which is why it is now ingrained in the system of our employees. In the morning, you fill in the askemo within a few seconds and in the afternoon we have our weekly team meeting. In this meeting, we can immediately share the successes of that week with each other. But the most important thing is that it takes into account when someone is not feeling well, so that we can conduct an optimal and valid employee satisfaction survey. You used to try and do that, but not everyone finds it easy to come out in the open. Askemo lowers that threshold so that, if necessary, action can be taken immediately. Not only does the well-organised dashboard, which we receive after askemo, give us a better idea of what the trends and developments are, it will also be very much needed with our growth in mind.”

 

"Askemo lowers the threshold for giving feedback so that action can be taken immediately if necessary.

With modern project management, you say, projects must become more successful. What is modern project management and what is the key to success?

 

“It’s about how you, as a project manager, know how to connect people and that you can explain why you are going in a certain direction. You want to know how customers feel about the competition, that is the undercurrent you have to keep an eye on. We do that with askemo, but that’s not the point. We look at weekly scores and trends; we see that our activities are really optimising results for a project. For us, this is a form of modern project management. In the beginning, not the highest scores are obtained, but it is completed more and more successfully. We look beyond the factual, and above all look at how people feel. We like to work with modern project managers who also lead and facilitate. With askemo, the deeper question is asked and we see this as the tool to achieve employee engagement.”

Do you want to know more about Laurens’s vision on ‘modern project management’ and the importance of staying connected, with clients and with employees? Two Dutch on-demand webinars with Laurens have been recorded.

  • The first one is about modern project management, in which Laurens explains why tunnel vision leads to failing projects and the quality of the connection is the key to success. Watch the webinar here.
  • How employee engagement at Adapt Innovation is increased in practice is shown in this webinar. After watching that webinar, you’ll know how to always stay connected to your team.