The Crossland Group’s multi-year engagement with the World Bank Group illustrates the transformational approach it takes in partnering with social and private sector clients around the globe. When Crossland first began working with Jim Wolfensohn, president of the World Bank Group, the organization needed an external perspective to address multi-stakeholder global challenges, such as the HIV/AIDS epidemic, particularly at a country level. They lacked the internal capability to accelerate the type of large-scale change their clients needed.

Working directly with the president and his chief of staff, Dr. Frannie Léautier, Crossland accelerated the alignment and implementation of the World Bank Group’s strategic priorities.

We began by building a coalition of savvy mid-level leaders across various sectors in the Bank. These leaders were able to provide the president with the insights and mechanisms he needed to identify initiatives requiring integration and accountability. It also enabled him to build processes to sustain change throughout the Bank.

Crossland then focused on mobilizing the Bank’s key stakeholders. We did this by developing structured convenings of internal and external groups at a global and country level. Using Crossland’s Accelerating Change Together (ACT) process, which is designed to break down functional and geographic silos and compress problem-solving and implementation time, we reshaped the Bank’s learning strategy to better develop staff and provide learning opportunities for clients.

Finally, we helped the Bank build an integrated organizational structure to accelerate sustainable change on issues ranging from poverty reduction to infant mortality to youth unemployment.

Significant cost savings and more integrated opportunities

Our impact was widely felt. In the first year, our efforts revealed inefficiencies and overlap between sectors that led to significant cost savings and more integrated opportunities with the Bank’s clients. It helped the President realign the budget to relevant strategic priorities, improve cross-sectoral work, and led to a collaborative partnership between Crossland and the World Bank that continues now, over a decade later.