Leaders
workshop
Strategy can be a slippery fish when you’re hearing about it at an away day and have to take it back to your team and implement it.
I was brought on board to create a workshop activity to do just that for AXA at there top 150 away day – at Anfield.
I gave them lots of ideas to take them at their word, that the theme of the event was dare to be different. Suggesting they record their own ‘Anfield Raps’ to communicate parts of the strategy might have been too daring.
Weaving together all of the elements we had – the brand, the strategy, the venue, and some sporty language that seemed to be their natural parlance – we arrived at ‘The Back Page’. An exercise where they would create their own newspaper articles to show their understanding of and ability to articulate the strategy once back with their ‘home’ teams.
Football-style training bibs set up the session with a randomised team selection element, before whisking them off to separate break out rooms to decide on their article themes and how to create them, through the plethora of craft materials provided to them.
Back of the net
“Who’d have thought a creative exercise would be our highlight of the event?!” uttered the event lead as everyone returned to the plenary. Who’d have thought, indeed.
I was satisfied that the combination of a creative task, level playing field where everyone was ‘outside their comfort zone’, and focus on engaging communication gave them all confidence in returning to their teams with the action points of the strategy reset.
And not only that, many were talking about re-running the exercise with their teams as a way to strengthen collaboration and get further buy-in to implementing strategy. Win-Win-Win.
This project demonstrated the true power of creativity, when it’s not confined to the ‘creative industry’ but put in the hands of real people who haven’t felt creative since school.
This project was completed with MSL (Publicis Groupe).