We are very proud of the result of a two days Visioning seminar animated online.
The customer is a Chinese industrial company willing to Implement Innovation and Value Creation to support sustainable growth on a mature market. The goal of our mission is to create alignment on what these strategic axis (what does it mean, what’s the purpose, what do we need to change ?) and to prepare change management with a customized tool box. We initially proposed to start with a Visioning seminar with the leadership team and future ambassadors (24 p). Due to Covid-19 we finally made it online and the team really had the feeling of having overcome the challenge in the end.
Four virtual meeting rooms have been set for a first group of 12p split for different workshops (2 x 6 or 4 x 3). Two consultants were there to share inspiration, feed-back from questionnaires and interviews done in preparation, and to propose a methodology with instructions and templates for the different workshops. They were able to supervise and assist production of the groups who were working together to fulfill the shared templates. They were also compiling and summarizing the groups production to help them converge. It requires a precise agenda and some discipline to manage connections and sharing, but it does work. We will animate cascading sessions to complete and roll-out the output.
We followed the visioning process in four steps. Having relevant tools (result of years of experience about the process in the “classical” mode) is certainly a key success factor.
The last key factor of success is the team of participants (thank you Fengchun) who were confident about the fact that it would work, and were actually eager to test and learn. Chinese people are amazing!
After this first experience, we have decided with the customer to continue the mission online to gain time in implementation.
I’m sure this way of working will become a must in the future even without confinement. We saved time without traveling, the CO2 impact of the servers used was certainly much less than the flights. We found a way to mitigate the time difference, starting at 7 am (2 pm in Shanghai). Half of the participants were working from home.
The emotional link, usually fostered by face to face interactions, was stimulated in this experience by the collective challenge for the team, to think about future in the context, and to test new tools. In the future we will need to constantly innovate with more interactive tools, and still animate face to face seminars when needed.
