businessinfomag.uk
magazine
08
The Ludic Group, meaning
playfulness, is an award-winning
consultancy founded in 2004. It
provides blue chip organisations
like Coca Cola, Novartis and
Barclays with digital transformation
programs, engagement toolkits
and next generation learning tools.
It has revenues of circa £5 million
and employs about 30 people
including creatives, developers and
administrative staff.
In addition to online learning
and engagement tools, Ludic creates
collaboration & learning spaces that
combine technology, furniture and
sliding, mobile walls. It can assemble
these temporary pop-up structures
on a client site or, for larger events, in
a warehouse, hotel ballroom or other
hired space. It has also created a number
of permanent collaboration centres for
clients such as University of Cambridge
and Ernst & Young.
Radical flexibility
From the start, the two founders, Paul
Ashcroft and Garrick Jones, wanted to
create a different way of working. “We
really wanted to design something with
radical flexibility,” they said.
The company’s lawyers and
accountants are office-based, but other
employees tend to work from home or
‘third spaces’. For client meetings and
programme planning and production,
Ludic makes use of rentable spaces and
clubs, notably the Hospital Club, which
has restaurants, production facilities, TV
studios and event spaces.
“We know how to create
environments that promote
collaboration and knowledge sharing,”
explained Ashcroft. “We might go into a
pretty boring looking environment and
set up the facilities people need to work
together – to document, to collaborate,
to play, to work individually, to work in
large teams.We work in that way with
The first week of October was National Work LifeWeek, set up by theWorking Families charity to
promote work-life balance and employee well-being. To mark the occasion,
Business Info
discussed
‘radical flexibility’ with Paul Ashcroft and Garrick Jones, founders of global consulting and design
business The Ludic Group
The art of modelling
We know
how to create
environments
that promote
collaboration
and knowledge
sharing
WORK LIFE
our clients too.”
Jones adds that one of the challenges
the company has set itself over the last
10 years is to achieve the same results
in an online environment that it gets
from its physical events. To this end, it
has developed a variety of online tools
and apps, including a collaboration
platform that allows users to build
timelines together, to storyboard and do
visual work together. These give staff a
shared corporate workspace and sense
of identity.
“Flexibility requires a number of
different things to be present, like
access to knowledge resources and
communities, being able to very quickly
access calendars and join up with
people.We couldn’t find anything that
had all of what we need to be best
in class, so about eight years ago we
started building it ourselves,” he said.
In addition, Ludic makes use of
standard communication technologies
like Skype and Zoom, program
management tools, ERM solutions and
other technology. But that, says Jones, is
only half the story.
“Collaboration and flexibility is also
about our culture, and we work very, very
hard on that.We've got mothers who
are working three days a week, we've got
fathers who are looking after children,
we've got single parents, we’ve got
young people, we’ve got older people in
our faculty.We have an incredibly diverse
group of people we work with – artists
and scientists. That’s part of our USP and
our culture enables that,” he said.
“Everybody at Ludic writes their own
contract and our focus is very much
outcomes-based, rather than ‘cookie
cutter’ process-based.We’re looking for
clients to receive what they want.We
don’t necessarily care too much about
how they achieve it; just that they
achieve it. That’s the most important
thing.”
Ludic pop-up enviroment
