About Firgun
At Firgun, we envisage a world where everyone can contribute purposefully, without fear of ridicule or reprimand. Creating spaces where you can play to your unique strengths and virtues, contributing to high-performing, inclusive teams is not only what we excel at – it’s what drives us.
And there’s a word to describe that motivation: Firgun.
It’s a Hebrew word that translates to English as the “genuine, sincere and pure happiness for another person’s accomplishment or experience.”
It’s that warm glow we feel when we some something good happen to someone else or when we celebrate other’s successes.
Let's create spaces where all can contribute purposefully,
without fear of ridicule or reprimand.
What we do
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Culture & Personality
Uncover and amplify the best in the people that make up your company to co-create high-performing environments
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Leadership Development
Whether you're an emerging or an established leader, we help you to uncover hidden potential, improve self-awareness and develop further
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Coaching & Counsel
Develop greater self-knowledge and discover practical actions for improved communication, teamwork and leadership.
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Speaking & Facilitation
Bring value to any audience, with subjects covering psychology, personality, culture, leadership, team-working, employee engagement, and academic research
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Team Development
Learn to value the diversity that we each bring to a team, create the environment where those benefits can be utilised, and move from frustration to fascination
Spark for Individuals
Lumina Spark reveals the potential of people and inspires their personal and professional growth.
People become aware of their ability to influence with greater emotional intelligence and communicate with high impact.
Spark for Teams
As virtual teams, agile project teams, virtual meetings and reports increase, people need to build effective relationships quickly.
Our team solution creates a powerful understanding of the existing personalities in the team, their key factors, and all of this, acting as a catalyst for greater effectiveness.
Spark for Organisations
With our Lumina methodology, we increase organisational effectiveness through the design and use of innovative solutions to improve the capabilities of individuals and human relations within the organisation.
Our mantras
Values are useful. They help individuals determine what’s important to them and how to behave.
At an organisational level, they have their uses, too. But organisational values can be subjective and contextual.
For example, “We operate with respect” is a commonly chosen value. But whose respect are we referring to?
In New Zealand, it is considered a lack of respect to lean on any surface that food might be served or eaten on. However, in the UK, we often have meet-up points for buzz sessions and catch-ups that include standing tables. It’s not usually considered disrespectful to lean on these tables – even though some people might eat a breakfast bar or sandwich there.
What’s respectful to one person might be – inadvertently – disrespectful to another.
This is why we utilise mantras.
Mantras are descriptive of the behaviours, decisions and approaches that we wish to see in our organisation. They are as impactful as values – but provide greater nuance and context to inform how all people within the organisation can add to our success.
We tend to focus on outputs and results.
What’s our profitability? What’s our conversion? What’s our EBITDA?
Firgun believe that performance is a side effect of having the right culture, leadership, approach and strategy.
Focus on the inputs; the honey will come.
Bad jobs, outcomes and behaviours happen. And it’s natural to fixate on and mitigate those outcomes.
We have governance and HR processes and reporting to identify non-compliance.
But tackling those individual “bad jobs” without tackling the underlying drivers of that behaviour means that it’s likely to reappear.
Culture influences how we get things done, how we make decisions, our appetite to risk and change, and lots more.
If we know where to look, it leaves its telltale impact – including when the culture is encouraging and supporting our business.
Finding that evidence and understanding the complex dance between these parts ensures that we don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.
Like culture, success also leaves footprints.
But success is a retrospective indicator: We don’t know we’ve achieved something until we have achieved it.
What does success look like in the future? How do we create the culture and support the behaviours that will move us towards that success?
These are the questions we ask of strategies, culture and outcomes to ensure alignment to your future goals.
There are over 170 cognitive biases that have been identified. Each of these is designed to keep us safe and to process our environment, relationships and cognition efficiently.
But many of these encourage the status quo; to stick with approaches that we’re familiar with – often without challenging why we have those approaches.
This mantra is about critically analysing why we have certain approaches and ensure that it’s not bias that’s directing our strategy.
If lots of people break a rule, it's a rule problem
Businesses need rules and expectations. They set the tone for how we measure what we achieve and how we determine is the best manner to achieve.
But our biases encourage us to stay with the familiar – even when our organisations, industries, markets and customers change. How do we know that those business rules are still supporting our goals?
If everything is important, nothing is important. What are our goals? How many priorities do we have? What processes are necessary?
As we grow, we can find we naturally introduce complexity into our businesses and our lives. It can feel good to be juggling so many things.
But how much more effective could we be if we focused our finite resources?
Our actions – our decisions, language, approaches – are always the result of our behaviours.
Our behaviours are the result of a complex web of interaction between our personality, our learned experiences, mindset, biases and coping mechanisms, and the social norms and culture of our group memberships.
Focusing on that complex web is how we create sustainable, meaningful change in behaviour and actions.
Our founder used to be a basketball point guard.
A point guard has the ball in their hands more than any other player and every team member relies on them to get them involved, play to their strengths and control the pace of action.
A good point guard knows every teammate.
Where they score from and where they miss. If they prefer to catch at chest or face height. If they need eye contact or if you can sneaky pass to them.
And them knowing that you’re always the first back on defence if something doesn’t go to plan.
It all comes down to knowing your team’s individual strengths and putting them in a position for them to succeed.
Eyes up. Ears open.
Always learning about your team and how to make them better.
Listen to the latest podcasts
With a background straddling vocational, voluntary and academic research and experience, our founder, Danny Wareham, brings a range of insights to a variety of subject areas.
Specialising in culture and social group psychology, this provides opportunities to discuss leadership, team performance, engagement, psychometrics, vision, talent, and individual motivation; together with his own studies into a new model of leadership for contemporary organisations: Constellation Leadership.
