Coteminas / Springs Global Participações S.A.
Waking up the Americas' largest textile group with a 10-week ExO Sprint.
A vertically integrated industrial leader with plants in Brazil, the USA and Argentina, 10,000+ B2B clients and decades of legacy — sprinting to think, organise and bet like an exponential.
Sprint
ExO Sprint (10 weeks)
Industry
Industrial / Consumer goods
Scale
200+ applicants, 48 sprinters
Year
2017 – 2018
A moment from the sprint
48 sprinters. 10 weeks. One cohort that left thinking — and acting — like an exponential.
The challenge
Innovate inside an organisation built to resist change.
Coteminas leads its category in the Americas. But the Fourth Industrial Revolution rewards a different operating system — one optimised for experimentation, not for protecting an installed base.
Leadership wanted two things at once: a portfolio of credible new bets and an internal cadre of leaders capable of replicating the method long after the engagement ended.
The sprint
10 weeks. Two streams. One method, repeatable forever.
- 01
Pre-Awake
Salim Ismail keynote framing the opportunity and the immune-system problem inside legacy organisations.
- 02
Selective Process
200+ applicants assessed; a genetic-algorithm matcher composed maximally diverse teams across skills, age, gender and hierarchy.
- 03
Awake & Discover
Three-day workshop on Lean Startup, Agile, prototyping and exponential tech — followed by four weeks of guided discovery.
- 04
Disrupt & Build
Two streams in parallel: Edge (ventures outside the core) and Core (initiatives inside the org). Concepts prototyped and pressure-tested.
- 05
Final Presentation
Board-ready portfolio of bold bets handed back to leadership, with trained internal facilitators ready to run the next wave.
Outcomes
A board-ready portfolio — and a transformation muscle that stays inside the company.
From kickoff to board-ready portfolio
Edge ventures + Core transformation in parallel
Algorithmically matched into diverse teams
Internal leaders trained to replicate the method
Client testimonial
"I believe that our expectations for this first step were surpassed. We finished the 10-week sprint today and I believe we have great projects. But more important is that we changed the culture of our organisation by creating leaders that now know how to act in an exponential way. We are excited to share this new culture with the entire company."
Josué Gomes
President · Coteminas
"If you try to implement technological disruption in any big company, its immunological system will attack you — because all of our organisations are built to resist change and the risks that come with it."
Salim Ismail
Author, Exponential Organizations · Sprint keynote
Voices from the sprint
What the sprinters said, in their own words.
"We're not just here just for the fun or for the ideas, we're here to change the company."
"It's changing how we think and how we look at innovation. And what I see here is really different from all the innovation that we did up until now, and we did a lot. It will definitely bring and yield some new opportunities."
"We have been able to internalize all of the ExO attributes and the agility of the ExO methodology and we can apply it here."
"The personal discovery about myself and people I work with was a huge takeaway, I've grown a lot in the past 10 weeks."
"The most changing 10 weeks of my life. I can't wake up and think the same as I used to before. I learned to let go of regret, I learned to cut an idea and let it go."
"This is totally transformative. Like drinking from the firehose. I got to meet people across the depth of the culture, this was outstanding."
Got a legacy business and a bold bet?
We'll come back with a sprint plan in 48 hours.