Scenarios For Digital Economy

DIGITAL-UPSTREAM-MINIBYTES

How To Explore Scenarios For Digital Futures

The Challenge

Scenarios For Digital Futures

Client: Confidential | Size : 22 People | Duration: 1 day | Location: Houston, Texas, USA

With the intention of engaging customers in a new way, this global IT giant hired Starfish Taylor to  design and facilitate a one-day workshop focused on helping key upstream O&G customers reimagine their digital future – essentially posing the question: “What does it mean to be a ‘digital upstream business?’”  The intent of this industry workshop was three-fold:
  • explore the future of the digital economy with peers – what is the digital economy, what does it mean for our industry, what does it mean to me?
  • identify trends in Big Data and key digital action initiatives using various future scenarios
  • build off ideas from other participants and begin to envision the digital opportunities awaiting the industry and a specific company
Starfish Taylor’s charge in designing the event flow was to create awareness, foster ideation, surface key concepts, and help identify first-step digital initiatives  in a fun and  engaging manner. It was a unique, one-day experience for attendees.

Our Design

In alignment with our Nutcracker methodology, Starfish Taylor professionals designed and  facilitated a successful industry workshop for our client.  Starfish Taylor and our client collaborated on workshop design, effectively blending our 15 years of design experience with the client’s leading digital expertise.  With a talented team to manage and facilitate the workshop, including a facilitator, graphic artist, and content expert, Starfish Taylor delivered a highly engaging and dynamic workshop that hit objectives.  A non-linear, targeted agenda allowed participants to fully explore innovative digital ideas from a variety of angles before vetting them as a group and identifying key digital scenarios and initiatives for the future.

Our journey during the workshop followed this path:
  • A welcome exercise aimed at understanding the profile of the participants through targeted questions in a gallery format that allowed easy reference during the day.
  • Kicked-off the day introducing the digital economy context and what the workshop endeavored to achieve – this was a high-level, framing introduction used to thank, motivate, and inform.
  • External perspective was offered to enrich the participants’ understanding of the digital world and the huge scope of future opportunities.
  • An Icebreaker targeted interesting topics, introduced the process, and injected fun into the workshop. We set the stage for the workshop NOT being business as usual. It opened the door to getting ready to innovate!
  • Time was allotted for participants to give their Individual Perspectives on the topic – this is an essential component to in our design process as multiple points-of-view help the group collectively understand the maturity level of the participants’ thought process, where common areas of thinking exist, and what future-stretching and innovative ideas we can identify early.
  • A future ideation exercise allowed us to explore future events impacting the industry – are there technology or other political, social, environmental developments that we need to plan for or around?
  • Future Scenarios continued to draw out digital ideas that could transform the industry.  Participants were dvided  into 4 groups, each focused on a different future scenario to provide time for deeper analysis on the topics.
  • A discussion and voting process was held to prioritize the areas of digital interest.  Where will the first changes occur and where will we likely act first?

The Results

Dynamic, highly-engaging, and fun workshop successfully delivered with glowing feedback from the customer and attendees from Oil and Gas companies.  Our client sponsored an event for its upstream customer-base that furthered their initiatives to have a digital conversation in a new and inspiring way while also teasing out new product / service ideas to consider.

Big Data Resources Starfish Taylor

Big Data Resources Starfish Taylor