In this series of blogs, I will walk you through a sanitized but actual design thinking value exercise conducted by one of my colleagues for a potential project titled “Nova“. If you recall my Design Thinking Recipe for Value Envisioning Workshop, I had indicated that I always like to begin with an ice-breaking exercise regardless of how well the participants know each other.
There are many ice breaking exercises if you were to search for it on the internet. Given that it is based on facilitator’s preference, organization’s tolerance for humor, participants’ familiarity with each other, I will not even attempt to recommend any.
For this post, I want to illustrate a sample vision alignment exercise. The vision alignment exercise does not have to be complicated but needs to be considered as more of a pre-cursor to ensure that the benefit objectives for project Nova are aligned with the corporate or executive vision.
I usually want the vision development to be free-flowing, based on what is happening in the industry, with the customers, competitors, and internally within the organization. Usually, there is a quite of overlap and duplication in the vision ideas. As a facilitator, you can weed out the duplicates during the exercise itself or just before voting. This is ideal to avoid split voting. Let me illustrate split voting with an example. Two great ideas that are relatively similar each get 3 votes from the group. In reality, it is 6 votes in total for this idea. But because the votes are split, the group may end up picking two less-stellar ideas that have 4 and 5 votes each. A seasoned facilitator will be to resolve it during the post-voting discussion and ensure that the right ideas are picked.
See the figure above for the actual exercise. It took 8 participants about 10 minutes to come up with the ideas. Given the number of these ideas, we had to land on the top four or five aspects of the vision. Using design thinking “votocracy” methods, we landed on the following five as the key elements of the corporate vision that project Nova aims to address:
- Manage Human & Intellectual Capital
- Continue Industry Relevance and Leadership
- Sustain Market Share and Fend Off Upstarts
- Increase Customer Base and Satisfaction
- Transform Business Model to Improve Performance
Now that we have landed on these key vision elements as those most relevant to Project Nova, let us dive into deeper into the objectives that will help the organization to realize those key vision elements. Stay tuned for my next blog post….
