Top Fortune 500 company was rolling out a company-wide transformation of their support organization affecting all parts of its global operations. The high level vision was in place, and the Strategy for the vision had been developed by a core team in consultation with the business. Starfish Taylor was engaged to design and facilitate a meeting of 100 people including executives to build various elements of the Deployment Plan to deliver the Strategy. A key element of success for this meeting was to have the attending business leaders understand the vision, endorse the strategy, and build the various deployment plans for execution.

The event was hosted in a wonderful chateau in the outskirts of Paris, with an excellent and well lit main conference building and a number of “annexes” that acted as self-contained meeting centers. Our design utilized these physical elements to the greatest extent possible by assigning each project to its own building. We designed the event to flow from the Share and Explore stage in the main building with all participants together, to the Test and Action/Roadmap stages with teams assigned to the four annexes to develop the Deployment plans for each project. Teams were blended and re-blended to make sure that the four teams did not create plans in isolation of the others, and pivot conversations were held during the Test stage to ensure broad cross-pollination of group ideas.

The closing session was a presentation by the four teams to the broad group on each plan, followed by a Q&A session. There were a number of presentations delivered by members of the client’s executive team, the core team, and by external experts in Knowledge Management. Starfish Taylor worked with these people to create a more visually inspiring way to get the message across.

In addition to the formal daily sessions, communication among all the stakeholders was carried through from the event days, into all the social activities and evenings. Team-building exercises went through to dinner such as a team wine tasting quiz, and to external activities such as karting and archery. Each was chosen with the aim of generating fun, competition, and accuracy. Key elements of success for such a project.

Achievements

The vision was well understood and the strategy was ratified. Deployment Plans were created for the four projects making up the Transformation Program, and consensus for the overall Communications Plan was developed. The groups created a large number of prioritized topics to investigate further (Parking Lot), that had not been considered prior to the meeting.

Other Outcomes

Post-event, a new spirit was clear and a common vision of how the transformation would positively impact the business was formed. Consensus built and momentum gained – key elements needed for effective deployment. The majority of people did not know each other coming into the meeting, and this creative and engaging meeting kicked off team-building that may not have been possible otherwise.

Deliverables

• Executive Summary
• Event Journal
• Graphical Illustrations
• Photos and Videos of event
• Media Package of all material generated during the project