About Us
GRIST is a tactical consulting and behavioural analytics company that has worked with customer focussed organisations for over 30 years.
We combine formal qualifications in behavioural psychology, learning development and organisational theory with decades of practical experience.
What motivates us:
Helping people to get better at what they do
The relationships we form with our clients and the part we play in their success
Finding new ways to inspire leaders and teams to change their behaviour and deliver better outcomes
Embedding training interventions for the long term.
GRIST’s philosophy has always been Excellence by degrees°
Trying to impose wholesale change on an organisation invariably fails. Struggling with change overload, people revert to ingrained patterns of behaviour. But if one tiny change is introduced, followed by another and another, these changes are adopted with minimal effort.
Imagine an ocean liner’s course was altered by a degree or two. To those on board, this change of direction would be almost imperceptible, but over the length of the voyage, the ship’s destination would become radically different.
Fundamental to GRIST’s work was the behavioural psychology concept of “successive approximation to the goal”. The best way to achieve change is by incremental improvements. Making frequent, small changes creates a feeling of success that motivates further behavioural change, leading to greater success and motivation. Today we call these small changes micro-behaviours. They are at the foundation of the work GRIST does to help customer facing teams and leaders succeed.
GRIST is never satisfied and pursues excellence through constant innovation. Every GRIST innovation began as frustration that became an opportunity to do something better. We do this by making observations and then acting to improve. Today micro-behaviours are a part of our DNA and enable our clients to achieve Excellence by degrees°, whether we are delivering programs face-to-face or via digital channels.
This is GRIST’s micro-behavioural approach in action.
How we do it
Our approach is simple, immediately actionable and enables Excellence by degrees° – small incremental steps of development that underpin effective on-the-job learning.
Engage your people to build buy-in and define what behaviours leaders and customer-facing teams need to do every day to bring your strategy to life.
Assess your organisation’s ability to support and embed these behaviours.
Design bespoke leader and frontline training programs to clarify the change and inspire people to act.
Embed the program through ongoing behavioural assessment, in-field coaching for leaders and integration into your business operating rhythms.
History
TODAY
GRIST strives for excellence through constant incremental improvements and innovation: Excellence by degrees°.
2016 • MICROBEHAVIOURS
After 27 years spent establishing and growing GRIST, Kim Grist passes the baton to key members of the GRIST team. GRIST’s micro-behavioural approach continues to build momentum into more scalable and sustainable solutions.
2014 • TRANSPARENCY & GOVERNANCE
GRIST observes that change programs invariably stall as leaders lose focus on their people and revert to operational priorities. GRIST develops YakTrak, a tactical people development system, that tracks the quality and quantity of coaching within an organisation. This provides organisations with transparency and governance to know how programs have been applied by their leaders.
2010 • BEHAVIOURAL ANALYTICS
Clients struggle to prove the impact that training programs have on business performance due to a lack of ability to measure change in behaviour. GRIST purchases Global Reviews and adds behavioural analytics to the business, providing insights into the quality of conversations frontline teams have with customers, and leaders have with team members.
2000 • SALES LEADERSHIP & SALES TRAINING
GRIST recognises that training isn’t enough to change the behaviour of large groups of people. GRIST becomes one of the first companies to link sales training to sales leadership by adding leadership development to the training process. Well-developed leaders, who understand the training their team is going through, help embed new ways of doing things on the job over time.
1989 • SALES & SERVICE TRAINING
GRIST is founded and finds a niche in financial services and highly-regulated industries. GRIST applies behavioural psychology to improve the quality of customer interactions using needs-based selling. GRIST training programs engage frontline teams and motivate them to take on new and different behaviours.
1988 • THE BEGINNING
Behavioural psychologist Kim Grist observes that most organisations ignore everything his field knows about human behaviour. He sees an opportunity to use the core fundamentals of behavioural psychology to help organisations, with large groups of people in customer facing teams, be more effective.
