From Purpose To Action

(image: Oliver Soulas)

Challenge

A change in the internal strategy and a massive restructuring within the IT unit (1,000 employees in Europe, Asia, North America) of a large financial B2B corporation in Europe triggered the need for an effective change communication. In addition, there were measures to create a team spirit within teams and a mutual understanding of the new strategy.

The new IT strategy focuses on value the unit provides to various stakeholder (internally, clients). Instead of being perceived as a cost centre, the goal was to communicate to all stakeholders that IT is rather an enabler of business.

Approach

In contrast to traditional change communication, we decided to enable units, departments, and teams by working out their own “value proposition“ to their stakeholders, all based on a solid “IT Purpose“.

All measures were in close cooperation with the responsible marketing officer of group communication:

• Create concept “From Purpose to Value“ and pitch to senior executives.
• Develop and co-lead “IT Purpose“ design thinking workshop with top senior executives.
• Design, organise and co-lead 7 second tier design thinking workshops examining the WHAT, pains and gains of stakeholders, benefits to create a value proposition for the department.
• I was an active part of all workshops and created a detailed documentation of the workshops with refined versions of the value propositions.
• Project management was a big part of the project. I helped organise the workshops and was responsible for the (communication) project plan.
• We provided PowerPoint and video and instructions/workflows to enable team leaders to lead their design thinking workshop in their teams.
• I drafted communication measures for internal channels on the progress of the project.

Result

The project not only helped department and teams to gain a better understanding what each team member does (vs supposed to do) and how to communicate to internal and external stakeholders with a unique VP, it stirred many valuable discussions within the team (and in most cases it improved the team spirit). The value proposition workshops are still ongoing.