Turning strategic plans into action

At the Confederation of Danish Industry yearly strategy seminar, the board wanted to make sure the strategic focus areas were translated into tangible and actionable plans. We helped them achieve this through facilitation and hands-on design methods.

During the three-hour workshop, we covered DI’s (Dansk Industri – Danish Confederation Industry) three strategic focuses, with the goal to reach a consensus on action points for the year 2022/2023.

Getting concrete

Coming up with ideas and opinions isn’t usually a problem – what is difficult is formulating them into something precise, concise, and actionable. To help the participants be concrete when discussing their ideas, we created pitch cards. The cards have limited space, and forces you to be concise about your idea and its value. The content on the pitch cards need to be self-explanatory they are a powerful way of making ideas tangible and facilitate the dialogue about the idea they represent.

After the pitch cards had been filled out, we used so-called heat-map voting where joined similar ideas and summarized the results.

Equal space for all

Group dynamic always play a crucial role in discussions. There’s always a tendency that some people speak more than others and vice versa. Hence, some ideas and opinions get more space than others. To counteract this and stimulate everyone’s creativity, we used two tools: 1) An initial conversation menu with topics to ‘break the ice’ between the group members, 2) Facilitation techniques to encourage the quieter participants while ensuring that the more talkative ones limited their use of the workshop time.