Creative approach bears fruit

“A MASSIVE thank you” says Sam Healey, Group People Experience Director..

This newly formed People Experience Team, faced with a huge wish list from the business (Countrywide), needed to define their game plan for 2016.

Sam (who heads up the team), asked Deborah Betts and Geoff Dodds to facilitate an ‘away day’ for her team to:

“Define the key areas of focus and who needs to work together on what, and how it all links together to deliver a connected service to the business”.

Keen to encourage the team to be creative and to think broadly, exploring ideas beyond their normal boundaries, we utilised big picture thinking and graphical recording techniques to help the team define their game plan.

The approach? We used an ‘orchard’ theme to enable the team to think creatively about their future focus. We tasked the team with creating an ‘orchard’ for the following year! They identified the type of fruit trees they were going to concentrate on growing & nurturing to:

…meet the demand while recognising that there is a lot to do, and only so much they can produce in 2016

…use their expertise to ensure they only grow the right varieties that provide a good yield of fruit that is not only tasty but disease resistant …ensure they establish a sustainable ecosystem to set up for strong production in future years

We helped the team to consider everything from ground preparation through to harvesting the fruit!

The results? Sam says it all….

“I wanted to say a MASSIVE thank you for everything you guys did today (and all the brilliant preparation leading up to it). It really was a fantastic day and I know we would not have got the quality of thinking, conversation and outputs if you had not led us through the day”