Stellar is the fruit of a collaborative research partnership between Angus Jenkinson and Richard Leachman, beginning in the 1990s, with further development by Kathelijne Drenth and an emerging community of practitioners and users.

Pioneer phase: preliminary questions and thinking

In this early phase, the research questions and conversations revolved around such issues as:

• How is the brand related to the intrinsic or essential identity of the organisation?
• What can be learned about the brand brand or organization from the experience of customers as they encounter it?
• Is an organisation a unique whole system?
• What are the roles of  values, design principles, patterns?

These are questions that can be discussed from multiple perspectives, especially leadership and management, business strategy, branding and integrated marketing, organisation development, human resource management, as well as such sciences of systems thinking, sociology, cybernetics and hermeneutics/semiotics. It even affects spiritual, ontological, epistemological and other philosophical questions of the organisation's purpose and being in relation to its stakeholders. Indeed, the question as to the extent to which an organisation could be considered an organic system or being played through the conversation.

Developing the tool: designing the Stellar identity system, 2002-2004

The questions Richard and Angus discussed took on a new resonance in the context of Angus's discoveries about dissonance, cohesion and performance in organisations arising from his University research (2002-5) into integrated marketing and integrated organisations. On the deficit side, it was clear that both the brand/marketing community and management generally had a severe problem because there was no comprehensive and consistent way of describing the organisation's identity; indeed there were multiple formulations, sometimes in conflict and certainly without coherence. If the structure and nature of corporate identity or brand system as an operational facet of management cannot be easily defined, then it's unlikely that an organisation will be optimised or work at its best. Marketing's problem in fact extended across the whole organisation. Research showed that because the organisation tends to be managed from multiple functional perspectives and there is no coherent standard way of defining identity, it's hard for leaders to resolve strategic issues and give the direction that is needed. This shows up in inferior or inconsistent customer experience.

Meanwhile, Richard Leachman was also developing his thinking and questions, such as asking what constituted the core of an organisation, how value is formed and flows through the value system of the organisation, the role of framing in creating organisation context and decision-making, and the process by which inspiration enters into and evolves the organisation. Both also shared an intense enquiry into how to understand the relationship between the organisation's whole and its elemental part (e.g. marketing, or a process or service experience).

This led Richard and Angus into new questions and an extremely active process of development to formulate a systemic tool that would express the whole identity of an organisation from its multiple perspectives but in such a way that none of them was an independent part.

New questions included:

• What organization factors define corporate identity (or the brand system)?
• How are these factors related to each other?
• What is value?
• What is the difference betwen the generics of a category and the uniqueness of a company?
• If an organisation is a unique whole system, how is this related to its identity and optimization?

To put this a different way, they were exploring the nature of a whole organisation as a biological or living ecosystem, bearing in mind that the property of organic systems is that each of the parts is defined by the whole (the identity system that is already present in an defining of the first cell), while of course the parts (heart, muscle, blood cell, synapses) also form the whole. If an organisation has the same properties, which it turns out it has, the whole organisation appears in each of its parts. Concepts in contemporary science and technology such as holograms, fractals, entanglement, complexity theory, and coherence may all be taken into account as well as the work of some systems theorists such as Bateson, Stafford Beer, Maturana adn Kuhlmann.

This was not just an academic exercise, although it has arguably led to scientific breakthroughs in management and leadership. Both Angus and Richard saw the organisation as a unique value-creating community or value system; high-performance (seen from a whole perspective) leads to benefits for all stakeholders and society at large. The concept of uniqueness is fundamental: just as each biological organism is unique (with its own immune system), so each organisation is unique, and has a value creating purpose (a concept that is a red thread through systems thinking). This led to the trademarking of the phrase "category of one".

During the period 2002-2004, their collaboration constituted the pioneer development of Stellar®. Stellar is an integrated approach to whole organisation management and a fundamental tool of integrated marketing. As an integrated whole methodology there are multiple perspectives by which it can be described or approached. This means that descriptions can be optimised for different groups of people (marketers, HR, strategy, operations and processes, CEO) or for different needs (something simple to get on with; deep systems theory and philosophy). Embedded into Stellar are some fundamental next steps in the evolution of management practice and thinking.

Emerging insights for leadership, 2002-11

What Stellar does is integrate the whole identity system of the organisation on a single page in such a way that the organisation navigates from trying to fix problems to identifying the actions and ideas that will take it to peak performance.

It achieves this by identifying the 12 domains of management leadership, value creation and organisational identity that together form a circular logic so that the end point in the process arrives at the beginning. Each domain (or field of activity) represents the next field of activity in the management of an organisation. For example, at 12 o'clock (on the Stellar circle) Stellar defines what makes the organisation's product unique,, where the product is everything that the organisation produces and puts into the world for customers. But the product exists to meet the needs of people, and so the unique needs that the brand's customers have are defined at one o'clock. However, as customers experience the "product" and interact with the organisation they form an impression of the organisational identity and personality, so that at two o'clock the unique brand personality is defined. In each case, they are defined from the perspective of what the organisation is truly like at its very best.

The conceptual model for this approach was provided by a tour de force lecture by Rudolf Steiner in which he described 12 philosophical world systems as a complete and fully defining set of philosophical worldviews with the same property that each represented a logical step of difference from its neighbour but together they formed a complete circle that embraced all philosophical worldviews. Richard and Angus wondered if the same might apply to the domains (or fields or nodes) of organisational identity.

There were some exciting consequences when this was found to hold true. There is an inbuilt logic of relationship: each of the domains has its opposite, for example. If the 12 together make a circle, then what is at the opposite side of the circle is also conceptually and operationally opposite, but they must work congruently for the organisation to be at its best. For example, if espoused or actual cultural values don't work with the business model of the organisation, then it will be sub optimised, i.e. the performance of the organisation will suffer.

If this sounds like a somewhat dry, scientific and complicated description then it's worth emphasising that the developers were keen to develop a scientifically and practically robust and effective methodology and tools. However, in practice Stellar deals with and engages the whole human, head and heart and will, and its application is inspiring and practical.

The development of the community

Angus and Richard had robustly defined the logic and structure of Stellar by the close of 2004, by which time it had also been tested in the form of different practitioner groups and client use. Since then, with the help of others, Stellar has evolved through better understanding and tools for working with it, emerging radical implications for management and leadership, and applications into various management and consulting practices. Significant credit must go to the third partner in the foundation of Stellar, Kathelijne Drenth, for her contribution to this development.

Expertise has been brought in from different specialist quarters and further research done into lean, performance management, HR management, marketing and brand management, acquisitions and mergers, team development and individual coaching. A network of accredited practitioners evolved, led by the efforts of Kathelijne Drenth.  Better ways of describing and understanding Stellar are still emerging. The relation to the new sciences, General Systems and Complexity Theories, strategy, navigation and development methods and more tools developed. We invite your participation in this.

Stellar is open-to-use

The three founders were convinced that the core IP in Stellar should be available for anyone to use. The rationale for this derives from the conviction of the founders, as stated above, that organisations exist to create value. It has therefore been released on an open-to-use basis and many individuals and firms on five continents have taken advantage of this. However, Stellar has sufficient functionality that users benefit from the facilitation of accredited practitioners. The Stellar practitioner network co-operates in its further evolution (see stellarnet.org). Stellar.org has been formed to facilitate further research and provide a set of tools for practitioners to use with their clients and clients to use with their people.