After major changes at all levels had created fear and confusion throughout the business, our client’s leadership sought to find a way to align stakeholders through a common purpose and vision for the future.
They turned to Blueline to take them through the process of defining their future and prioritizing the actions that would be needed to achieve it. But doing that well was only half of the daunting challenge that faced them. After all that the organization had been through, finding a way to capture and tell the story of their journey in a fun and engaging way that inspired employees and clients to embrace the vision and take the actions prioritized by leadership, was just as important.
Our team set about to help them to transform their organization through a simple, yet incredibly effective, combination of planning and communications initiatives.
Capturing the essence of leadership’s efforts through a blueline drawing
In advance of a strategic planning meeting, a Blueline Partner collaborated with one of our Master Artists to begin to draft a table-sized blueline drawing that told the story of where they had been. We left significant amounts of white space on the visual so that there was room to capture their vision.
Sample Blueline Drawing…
Subsequently, Blueline facilitated a one-day strategic planning session to guide our client’s efforts to define their vision for the future and to prioritize the steps that they needed to take to get there. The same Master Artist that drafted the initial blueline drawing also attended the one-day meeting. Throughout the meeting, he captured the process and the leadership team’s decisions. The final output was an engaging, table-size visual that members of the leadership team could use to engage others by retelling the story of “where they had been, where they are going, and how they planned to get there.”
Engaging stakeholders through the use of a telestration
We repurposed the drawing and memorialized the leadership team’s efforts through a 4 minute narrated video capture of the Master Artist creating the drawing, so that it could be used to define and promote the organization’s brand. This required that we capture the story in the form of a script that mirrored the drawing. The final deliverable was a professionally narrated video of the Artist rendering the drawing for the audience. (Through the power of technology, the rendering takes place in about 1/60th the time it actually takes to recreate the drawing.)
Sample Blueline Telestration….
The client used the telestration and blueline drawing to kick-off their Future Vision initiative during their annual meeting. The meeting opened with the telestration – which laid a foundation for a presentation by the leadership team. Subsequently, three by five foot posters of the blueline drawing were hung throughout the meeting space so that participants could “re-experience” the journey with their leadership.
The outcomes are best summarized by the head of the organization who opined: “the successful outcomes of this initiative are an important lesson in embracing the types of innovation we want to support throughout the organization – through these efforts we got 80% of the way to our destination in 20% of the time it usually takes us.”
Is your organization facing a challenging transformation? Contact the change management experts at Blueline today!
