This Houston headquartered service company needed to develop a Health, Safety, and Environment (HSE) Roadmap with leadership input. Having used external consultants to conduct research, interview staff, and develop a strategy, they ultimately found that it wasn’t feasible due to a lack of management agreement. To overcome this obstacle Starfish Taylor was engaged to design a workshop with the executive team to review and confirm the Draft HSE Roadmap, taking into account the prior strategy work and interviews whilst leaving room for innovation, creativity, and the practicality of where the organization was on the HSE Behavioural Curve. They needed to make sure the workshop was engaging for all senior leaders present including the CEO, and ultimately achieved the requisite commitment for the HSE Roadmap to be actionable.

The core element of Starfish Taylor’s workshop design was to make sure each executive had the opportunity to express their point of view. This was fundamental to get a plausible HSE Roadmap that achieved collective leadership endorsement. Points of view were surfaced via small team discussions, and then a first draft of key areas of the roadmap was presented. We took these roadmap categories and had management group these into logical “buckets” such as HR, Risk Management, etc. To ensure we attacked the topics that management wanted addressed, participants then “voted with their feet” to assign themselves to a topic, then broke into small work groups by topic area to flesh out the key milestones for incorporation into the final HSE Roadmap.

Achievements

HSE Roadmap was completed along with a graphical storyboard and narrative of the journey – ultimately achieving the intent of the engagement which was to gain senior leader endorsement of the HSE strategy. An added benefit of the workshop collaboration was that a number of new ideas surfaced during the workshop that the VP of HSE could move forward on.

Other Outcomes

To the surprise of the sponsor team, the swim-lanes/categories on the HSE Roadmap contained elements that they had not considered prior. This confirmed the power of pulling the management team together to provide input on the Roadmap and allowing individual points-of-view to surface and be validated by the group. It is this group that best knows the culture of the company and the practical outcomes they wanted to meet in each region. As an end result, this group supported what they helped to create – the obstacle of management agreement was ultimately overcome and the organization landed with a HSE Roadmap they would support and action. And the real “ah-ha” moment was the closing by the CEO, who applauded his team for accomplishing so much in such an accelerated way.

Deliverables

• Graphical illustration of swim-lanes of the HSE Roadmap
• 10m long Story Board illustration developed during and after the session
• Executive summary and Event Journal
• Media Package of all material generated during the project