Interactive workshops to strategise and align
Building team alignment is one of the most important and challenging tasks that leaders face. Without alignment, the strategy is of little value as each team member pursues their own take on what will drive success. Despite this, misalignment is the exception, rather than the norm. It arises out of a combination of:
- Poorly defined strategy - at one stage the strategy may have been clearly defined, but business dynamics, market movements, macroeconomic trends, leadership changes or other factors have moved the business to a point where the old strategy is no longer useful or clear
- Lack of communication - leadership don't have the time or ability to clearly articulate the organisational strategy
- Lack of understanding - particularly at more senior levels, understanding the strategy requires a nuanced appreciation of the business interdependencies, market dynamics, customer preferences, economic considerations and more. Team members may simply be missing important parts of the picture, that lead to them drawing well-intentioned but incorrect inferences
- Lack of buy-in - team members understand the strategy, but have different ideas on what the strategy should be, and pursue these because of their personal conviction
What most businesses do
The typical solution to a poorly defined strategy and team misalignment is for businesses to engage in a series of workshops, roadshows, town halls, newsletter updates, and team meetings. Each of these methods are useful - a complex topic like the organisational strategy needs to embedded and reinforced, and each team member will assimilates information differently.
Interestingly though, workshops often miss the mark, despite huge budgets and big expectations. The hidden cost of workshops is of course the opportunity cost of each of the attendee's time - all up, businesses often spend in excess of $100,000 for a half-day workshop when direct and indirect costs are considered.
So why is it so common for workshop to miss the mark? Unsurprisingly, for many of the same reasons that strategic misalignment is so prevalent in the first place - a poorly defined strategy, ineffective communication, and an experience that may give team members an intellectual understanding, but not a genuine buy-in.
The missing ingredient - interactivity
Smart businesses still run workshops - they just run different workshops. Smart businesses recognise that a well-designed workshop can in some cases help set strategy (when that is the intention), or give leaders an intellectual understanding and buy-in that can catalyse alignment and improved performance.
Consistently, the workshops that hit the mark are those that are interactive. Not just interactive with superficial ice-breakers or polling, but interactive to the point that the strategy, learning and insights can only be realised if the actions of the participants are actually creating and dictating the content that is covered during the workshop. This creates an obvious risk in instructional design to ensure that the workshop achieves the intended outcomes, but when well designed and executed, the ownership, understanding and alignment that it creates can be game changing.
Our approach
Ilan has designed interactive and experiential workshops for some of Australia's most well respected businesses for over 7 years. His approach relies on a simple set of steps that leverage tried and tested best practices, while honouring the individuality of every client and every workshop:
- We take the time to understanding how your business makes money, it's strategy, what success looks like, and the business and project's key constraints. These insights, which form the DNA of your business, are baked into any solution we build - we approach this is as a 'business first' challenge, rather than a 'training' challenge
- We work with you to understand the goals of the workshop. Is the primary goal to use the time to define the strategy, align and engage the team around the strategy, or both
- We conceptualise the solution, which at this stage is technology agnostic
- We identify the best technology (if any) to deliver the interactive content. The level of sophistication of the technology will usually correlate with the complexity of the content, the number and seniority of participants, and the speed required to collect and aggregate results
- We build the interactive content. Our focus during this stage is to bring the real-world business dynamics to life in a way that is both intuitive and digestible, but doesn't feel artificial or contrived. Our ability to do this - to deliver two outcomes that appear mutually exclusive - is one of our unique competitive advantages. Throughout this process, we maintain intense attention to detail. Depending on the purpose and audience, we may build a business model to anchor the content
- We run the workshop. Your facilitator is the same person that took the time to understand how your business makes money, conceptualise the solution, and build the solution. Participants benefit from being guided by a facilitator that knows their business as comprehensively as the workshop content
