Workshops

Workshops

We tailor our workshops to meet individual needs, which are seldom simple and almost never aimed purely at any one target. What follows is a simplification, therefore, and we would expect to spend at least a day working with our clients in order to define exactly what it is that they want to achieve. Those who have managed complex projects will recognise the need to get overall aims and the final deliverables absolutely clear before starting work!

If the client's goals are unachievable or vague, or if the individuals concerned have problems of internal legitimacy, then we always say so at this stage.

Our workshop processes usually follow a path which is similar to that shown in the figure above. Below, we show what this entails. The buttons on the right jump to the specific modifications of this generic workshop process.
		The business environment
		Strategic insight and options
		Innovation and renewal

The initial goal-defining meeting is not shown on the figure. Typically, however, this will establish the goals and timetable of the overall process. It may well also define a cadre of people who should attend this meeting, selected for what they can contribute and, perhaps, for what they can learn. Some organisations like to have a participant group and an audience which does not participate, or which comes into play only in the tasking session at the end of the workshop. The pre-meeting may set work in train - either within the organisation or through external talent - with the aim of informing the initial meeting of relevant issues.

This leads into the first workshop. The outcome of this is an overview of the problem, and also an agreed and prioritised list of defined, largely self-contained issues. These are to be handled by discrete teams or individuals, and are to report back to the second "synthesis" workshop on what they have found.

The second, synthesis workshop varies in form with the aims of the project. This is explored in the sections which follow. However, its task is to take in all that has been done, and re-frame this within the concerns of the organisation and the aims of the overall project. Facilitation is absolutely crucial to inexperienced teams that are undertaking this task for the first time. The project teams report back to it. Those attending the workshop were reponsible for tasking these teams, and so are both in a position to understand the relevance of what is said, and to judge its adequacy.

The product of this second workshop is largely intangible: it consists of ideas. However, it is usually possible to stream the issues into dominant themes. Further tasks are therefore set up, staffed by workshop attendees. These are concerned to refine the ideas so that they are robust, supported by evidence wherever possible and expressed in the least complicated terms that capture their richness. Such teams would usually set out to test the idea within the organisation, to understand how people think about the relevant issues and what ways of expressing this they would accept.

Th ethird stage in the process is seldom a workshop, and it is seldom easy to pre-defien what it will look like. In essence, those who have been working with ideas and with the organisation come to see what will work and what will not. They set themselves to create influence in a way that best fits the project, be it a presentation or a web site on the intranet, a board proposal or a set of scenarios. The success of the overall process is judged partly on how well this is received, and partly on how much general insight has been created and disseminated through the organisation. Complex processes seldom have only one consequence.

The overall aim of the procedure is to give people an overview of the system in which their activities are embedded: for example, in the way that capital markets see the company, in the way that the industry relates to its regulatory framework, in the way that competition operates or ideas propagate. Such insight is generically useful, and once installed informs decisions in all manner of unexpected ways.

By contrast, simple, one-off events (away-days, "days in the green") may produce some pragmatic ideas, but they often dominated by established consensus, by the set views of authority and by the desire to be seen to be "practical". It takes time and effort to get above these preconceptions, to see the system anew and to describe robust, practical new ways of addressing it with which the organisation feels confidence.

Multi-day workshops: business environment.

Reviews of the business environment differ from more applied projects, insofar as it can be difficult to say what a useful output "looks like". Scenarios are an example of an output that is half-way to being useful. They are only useful if the organisation is set up to make use of them. This said, there can be no complex organisation which will not benefit from a better shared understanding of how its world works.

It is, therefore, very important to define at the outset what the study of the business environment is "for". If it is to assess risk, for example, then one set of actions and deliverables are fitting. By contrast, if is it is intended to understand how customers are changing with a view to reshaping the brand, then another approach is needed.

Work that is aimed at understanding the business environment is uniquely open to third party involvement. Indeed, much of the work which the Forum undertakes is multi-client, in the sense of trying to get (sometimes literally) warring factions to envisage a more peaceful future, or more commonly, setting out to find a better way to think about an issue which has proven contentious. For example, a major firm may invite its peers, its regulators and relevant third party groups to sit together and think through what public health care, national energy delivery or pension provision might look like if it was re-conceived. The Forum has worked on all three of these topics.

The more common approach is, however, for an organisation - and sometimes a medium-sized country! - to ask us to help them to understand the forces that are impinging on them, on a project or in an area which is new to them and about which they feel uncertain. It is often the case that old, familiar areas suddenly take on a new and potentially threatening role. Governance and public liability is one such contemporary concern. Another is the management of security in a world of threats. Neither issue is new, but both need renewed attention.

The process begins with an assessment of what the client sees as being their problem. We assess this in two ways: first, as to whether - in our view - the client does indeed have a clear issue in mind, or merely a general area of concern. Second, we try to assess what a solution would look like for them. By this, we mean the processes or events with which an output would have to mesh - for example, who it had to convince, what framework of legitimacy it had to fulfil within the organisation, and to what timeframe it needed to respond.

If the concern is well-defined, then we slip directly into the workshop process set out in the introduction. Where the focus very diffuse, however, we often begin by interviewing across the organisation in order to get a sense of the source of these concerns. We present back what we have found in a compiled form, atempting to create a form of words that captures what we have heard. Agreement that these are indeed the issues begins the workshop process. This is discussed in detail in the introduction.

Open processes mean that work can be put out to third parties, and that outsiders can engage with the overall process, or with parts of it. This makes the managerial load greater, but brings in fresh views, specialist talent and contrarian insight. The steps by which insight is delivered are, as ever, complex, but the general flow is identical to that which is described in the introduction.

Multi-day workshops: strategic options and internal communications.

There are, of course, many consultancies which deliver strategic assessment. These operate to a wide range of models, from helping people to find their own answer to deploying external expertise and analysis in order to prescribe a solution. Such organisations set themselves up as doctors, and put the client in the role of passive patient. Implicit to such a model is that "strategy" is both something separate from routine business activity, and an activity which is only done episodically, when the old approach no longer works.

We reject this approach. Strategic thinking is continual and accretional: it builds on what has already been done. Outsiders can, of course, write an organisation's strategy for it; but they will deliver generic truths, applicable across the industry, and the firm in question will need to start from scratch when they again come to rethink their habits. Something has gone badly wrong with the management of organisations which effectively admit that they cannot find a way to understand ther own industry or policy sector.

Organisations which do find it hard to address these issues need help not in finding the answers, but is knowing how to ask themselves the right questions. Strategic thinking does require habits of thought, experience and human skills which are not important to pragmatic management in an unchanging world. We offer this support.

Our goal is, therefore, to help an organisation define the "chapter headlines" of a book which it must write (and rewrite) for itself. We help set up processes, we identify blind spots and we offer insight into the wider world. This said, our goal is to harness the internal expertise of the organisation towards the definition of these key issues.

The bolt-on model of strategy, where it is thought of as a separate process from that of good general management, usually sees it as something to be done to - rather than with - the knowledge base of the organisation. Senior staff see strategy as a tool through which their assumptions and views are applied ot the firm. However, to take this approach is to deny the enormous network of skill and insight that resides in any complex organisation. Senior staff are usually many years away from their technical training, and may have limited contact with the supply chain, the ultimate customer or the work force. The issue is, therefore, how a useful dialogue can be set up such that relevant pools of insight are asked the right questions, and how their knowledge can be deployed towards a permanently renewed - challenged, validated - way of seeing the strategic options that are open to the organisation.

What are strategic options? Essentially, they are choices that are open to organisations which will transform the grounds on which they do business, attract assets and retain legitimacy. The transformation will be both adaptive to the trends which characterise the operating environment; and also distinctive, in the sense of differentiating the organisation from the generic, run-of-the-mill responses forced on all.

Such choices are very seldom all-or-nothing affairs, but are rather adaptive ways of reacting to the world that are achieved as a result of relentless, multifaceted pressure to behave in certain ways. They are realised through years of using appropriate criteria for project selection, suitable staff rewards, firmly managed and understood policies towards communications, standards, risk management, probity and the like.

They are also distinct from the generality of how to survive in a given industry, such as cost management or legal compliance. Options which are robust, rooted in reality, distinctive in the sense of not being generic industry responses to general trends are not going to be installed in a single step, or created through a one-off process. They have to be grown by the organisation and through its active, selective, focused use of particular sources of insight and information.

How does one find and strive for the realisation of an option? How does one get to be unique, distinct from the herd of competitors? Essentially, by shared understanding of two things.

The first of these has already been discussed: insight into how value is generated in the field, and how it may be generated in the future. How is a public service to be best run ten years from now? How is a dominant firm - say, Microsoft today or IBM twenty years ago - to understand how they can maintain their dominance?

The second issue is closely related to this and grows from it. Employees need to understand the framework that has been constructed, and to see how they fit into this design. The pressures on them need to be managed so as to reinforce actions which take the organisation where it wants to be, and to deter actions which flow in other directions, however individually laudable they may seem. The implication of this is that very considerable efforts need to be put into tailored, focused communications; for how one conveys a message to one set of employees is quite different from how one talks to another. The same thoughts - of differentiation, but ultimate focus - need to be built into selection, reward and other criteria.

These issues are not separate. Enthusiastic and engaged staff contribute to understanding; well-deployed and well-communicated understanding creates engagement at all levels. These issues are discussed elsewhere.

This is all very abstract. How does it fit into our workshop processes? What do we do?

Where the organisation is not ready for it, sophisticated strategy work is pointless. If we sense that this is the case, then we suggest an initial assessment of the planning system. We offer help in the design of strategy and business environment-sensing processes. Strategy work of course begins from the business environment. We counsel organisations to begin with this - not least as it is unthreatening to existing management structures! - and to try to create a subsequent bridge between this work and nascent issues of strategy. For example, an organisation can map where they stand versus their peers, and identify the key dimensions along which this benchmarking should take place. "What is it that matters in this field, and where do we stand versus organisations with which we ordinarily compare ourselves? Does this point to areas of strength and weakness? What messages do we take from this?"

Mature organisations - but, surprisingly, not always wealthy nations - tend to have more sophisticated system is in place. Where this is the case, we set out to identify which of the two essential arms of strategy is the weakest: the consolidation and use of innate insight, or the creation of potential and the winnowing of accessible knowledge. We set out to strengthen this. That is, if insight is poor, then we suggest a workshop series that aim to develop this. The aim is to find out what the organisation needs to know in order to make better choices. If, by contrast, the organisation has a firmly defined outlook on the world, then what they may need is a better way of expressing it to their stakeholders. The workshop flow is the same, but is now focused on the identification of stakeholder groups, the assessment of what they have heard to date, what communications would engage them, what criteria would move them and so forth.

In the former case, the workshop output defines a better way of seeing the business environemnt, and maps this into the context of the orghanisation's dilemmas. It poses a series of questions to the stakeholders, couched in accessable language and tuned to the needs of the organisation's processes.

In the latter case, the output consists of recommended HR and other procedures, mechanisms for creating tailored dialogue between senior staff and those with something to contribute to option refinement; and so forth.

This assessment is written from clarity, not as a direct guide to action in the messiness of th ereal world. Frankly, no strategy workshop has been identical to any other that we have run. Each has to be tailored to meet local needs, something that takes considerable experience if it is to be done well.

Multi-day workshops: innovation and idea management.

Organisations have, ultimately, only three grounds on which to maintain long-term relative advantage over their peers.

• They may have access to innate advantages, such as regulatory position, brand, location, access to knowledge and the ability to operate at low cost.
• They may be able to manage their performance in a way which reduces their volatility, and so attract financial resources at a relatively low cost.
• The may be able to innovate and to renew themselves in ways which keep them distinctive and differentially attractive.

Only the capacity to innovate offers a durable defensible position. Brand fades if not maintained, market share withers if new and cheaper things are not brought on stream. As the output of companies and public sector bodies increasingly focuses on patterns of information - on managing subcontractors and causing things to be done, in sorting out complex situations - so the ability to renew complex structures will dominate productivity and defence against erosion.

Our workshops recognise that innovation has three enemies: ignorance of potential, muddle about goals and weakness in implementation. The substance of innovation - this gadget, that way of acting - is actually much easier to generate than the framework that allows this to bloom. If one knows that the public are pervades by uncertainty about - let us say - privacy when using the telephone, then it is not hard to think of technical ways of delivering this. If one convenes a group of engineers who know everything about telecommunications and nothing about customers, or what the firm is trying to achieve, or what an acceptable outcome to a meeting would look like, then one will be very lucky to arrive at a viable outcome. If one has such an outcome, but no means to implement it - or to test it on market-savvy people, or to see how it will fit with foreseeable legal issues, for example - then one is unlikely to have a successful project on one's hands.

Innovation that works comes about when three pieces of analysis are brought together:

• Where the organisation's strengths are under-used, or where it wants to build them up, or react to new potential or changing relationships.
• Where the business environment - consumers, competition, regulation, ways of operating - are changing swiftly. Altered tax of regulatory frameworks can be as fruitful to innovation as new technologies: consider mobile telephony as an example of this.
• Where the organisation has the will and the ability to take an idea that answers to these situations and to implement it. Implementation requires the right people, the right criteria, the right broad assessment systems -both between projects and within them - the right project management and risk containment systems, forbearance and trust.

The Forum carries out a preliminary assessment of this crucial third point, and will make recommendations if the client so requires. What we can do , however, is to bring together assessments of the first two points. The first workshop (as defined in the introduction) assesses the organisational strengths - that it makes ice cream, and thus has surplus capacity in winter, perhaps - and develops this into a series of niche ideas during the parallel development phase. This is brought together with an assessment of the changing business environment during the second workshop, wit the aim of finding concrete responses that could be made. Technical and other expertise can be imported from outside of the firm for the workshop. The output, after a phase of development, is a set of proposals for innovative projects that answer to these criteria.