One Team, One Vision
How we helped 80 employees collaborate to visualize their department strategy.
Client: The finance team of a leading manufacturing company.
The challenge: The department leadership had created their “Blue Sky” slide deck, and articulated their vision and roadmap. Their goal was to ensure that their strategy didn’t remain “words on paper.” They wanted it to be real and meaningful to all employees.
Instead of the traditional “roll-out with polished materials,” the client leadership team was looking for an engaging process that enabled all employees to have their fingerprints on the strategy. They wanted to visualize the “Blue Sky” — and create an aligning artifact that employees could reference every single day. The finance team (about 80 team members.) had a department-wide offsite coming up, and they invited Drawbridge to facilitate the strategy visualization process.
Our approach:
Design: With 80 + team members participating, our goal was to create a process that was highly interactive, engaging, and focused on results. We wanted to make sure all voices are heard. The Drawbridge team was staffed with four visual facilitators, ready to work with the large group.
Alignment workshop: We engaged the participants in a large-scale interactive experience, which included processes for:
An Appreciative Inquiry to surface areas of strength and pride
Group breakouts, with a series of conversations and rapid brainstorming exercises
Large-group sharing, gallery walks, voting, and convergence around the best ideas
Vision map: After the workshop, our design team took the visual ideas drawn out by the participants, and refined it into a Vision Map. Our deliverable was a beautiful one-page snapshot of the organizational direction.
Final deliverable and activation:
The client used the Vision Map as a tool for employee alignment. The map was produced into digital shareables and physical artifacts — everything from wall-sized installations to mousepads. Employees literally saw the vision every day and could easily reference it as they made decisions and took action.
The Vision Map served the client team well for 5 years and when they were ready for a “vision refresh”, the map was easily updated to reflect their new goals.
“Research shows that across organizations, only 14% of employees understand the organization’s strategy. 86% of your employees don’t fully get it.”
As a leader, your job isn't done when you create that strategy deck. Find ways to help your employees internalize the strategy. And if you want to explore how to do this creatively, give us a call.
[*reference to statistics: Forbes]