The main focus of the assignment was to target a group of twelve appointed facilitators and increase their skill sets in online facilitation and the use of Design Thinking as an overall framework. Throughout the program, the participants developed their ability to facilitate creative collaboration and ideation sessions online.

The training was highly interactive and interlaced short lectures with hands-on work. We worked with action learning and group coaching, taking participants through hands-on experiences followed by reflective evaluation sessions. Throughout the program, there were opportunities to share and formulate insights and discuss how to apply lessons learned in daily life in DuPont Nutrition & Biosciences.

As a final assignment the participants facilitated ideation workshops for internal clients with a need to develop innovative ideas around real business challenges.

“Henrik’s engagement with Design Thinking, and professionalism propelled us toward action based online learning whilst being blissfully unaware just how much we were capturing. His skill lies in unlocking the door to so many connective points such that the more you reflect and practice, the more you get from his course.”

Niall Young, Technical Fellow & PhD

The newly appointed CEO wanted to involve as broadly as possible when creating the new strategy and requested a strategy process where everyone in the organisation, all co-workers, all managers, members of the board as well as important stakeholders, citizens, audience and guests were engaged.

During initial dialogues with members from the management team we decided to use “The Strategy Loop” as a design of the strategy process. Furthermore we decided to do a blended process combining onsite with online activities.

The first step was to create a history map tracking the origins of Malmö Live, the Concert Hall and Malmo Symphony Orchestra back to its roots and define lessons learned. We used the canteen in the concert hall as an interactive exhibition and collected perspectives across the organisation.

During the initial seminar a “Strategy Group” of 30+ employees representing a cross section of the organisation gathered all the perspectives from the exhibition and defined important learning points that needed to be included as a foundation for the new strategy.

Next onsite seminar for the Strategy Group focused on defining the current state and it initiated an online process where all employees were invited to contribute to gathering of intelligence and foresight.

Over 140 foresight signals were gathered by more than 60 employees and during an online seminar the signals were analyzed and categorized into strategic insights pointing out important strategic crossroads for the organisation.

The mapped crossroads was handed over as input to the management team who during a facilitated onsite workshop prioritised and created the outline for the strategy and returned it to the Strategy Group for anchoring during another online session. 

Now the members of the board (politicians) were invited into the process through an online workshop and the board made an initial approval of the strategy outline.

Finally, the management team continued the development of the strategy during a serie of meetings and the strategy was approved and decided upon ten months from the initiation of the strategy development process.

Photo with Robert Trevino and MSO: Håkan Röjder

The Strategy Loop is described in the book “Den Strategiska Loopen” by Ingela Sjölund,  ISBN 9789175650838 and in this video: https://vimeo.com/136286699)

Sydbank wanted to ensure that their 2019-2021 strategy – to become “A Stronger Bank” – had been understood, processed and refined by all leaders within the organisation. They also wanted to empower and inspire its leaders by giving them the opportunity to share their previous successes in different strategic areas.

Sydbank’s head of communication approached Emerging with an invitation to start a dialogue. This led to meetings with the CEO and executive management team who outlined Sydbank’s needs and expectations: they wanted their leaders to understand that they were making a difference and that they will continue to contribute to Sydbank’s success in becoming ”a stronger bank”. Doing so required a novel solution that had not been tried out before.

Emerging took on the task to develop and facilitate a strategy day for all 300 leaders through a novel process that was designed specifically for Sydbank’s needs. The resulting Strategy Hackathon was carried out in March 2019 by a team Emerging facilitators alongside co-facilitators from Sydbank. The highly structured and dynamic process employed methodologies such as appreciative inquiry and co-creation to refine the strategy and allow leaders to enter into dialogue both laterally across silos and vertically throughout the hierarchy.

The Strategy Hackathon are now used by the managers in Sydbank to bring the strategic discussions closer to their own units and employees. It has become an easy-to-use toolbox to maintain a dialogue about the organisation’s direction and strategy, while honouring past successes to fuel and focus the busy daily operations.

”The Strategy Hackathon we co-created with Emerging was a great success on the day, and exactly the day we wanted with lots of energy and interaction centered around the most important topic for us – our strategy. The Strategy Hackathon made a difference in the way we look at ourselves and what is possible in our bank. We are proud of what we achieved, and we see leaders more easily engaging their units and employees in a process around the strategy based on the process material, templates and guidelines we used on the day, and which was easy applicable for the managers to use themselves.”

– Søren Reumert Kommunikations- & Marketingdirektør

Project Leaders & Lead Facilitators: Marianne Egelund Siig & Amy Jean Hamilton
Project assistant: Sofie Lund
Process review: Gry Guldberg Friis
Co-facilitators: Jens G. Friis, Christian Munch Svendsen & Alexandra Benedicte Collin

Denmark’s reputation was damaged in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region following the publication of the Mohammed cartoons in 2005. In order rebuild Denmark’s relationship with the region, the Danish Foreign Ministry decided to reach out to leaders in Jordan and Egypt through the Danish Youth Council (DUF) – an umbrella organisation with more than 70 children and youth organizations.

In 2009, DUF brought Gry Guldberg from Emerging onboard to develop the programme. Gry recognised that in order to defuse the tense and potentially explosive relationship, Denmark’s communication with the MENA region needed to move from debate to dialogue. Developing a method to realise this vision, however, was an enormous challenge.

Through pretotyping, action learning and gathered experiences, Gry and DUF co-created the Dialog Ambassadørene (Ambassadors for Dialogue).

The programme is under constant development in order to ensure that its methodology, tools and approach can be applied worldwide.

Over the past ten years, Gry has educated 300 Ambassadors for Dialogue together with her Danish, Jordanian and Egyptian partners and trainers. These Ambassadors for Dialogue have designed and facilitated workshops and reached  40,000 young people in Tunisia, Jordan, Egypt and Denmark. She was also professional consultant for DUF’s Dialogue Handbook, which has been translated into into Danish, English and Arabic.

She maintains the respect and integrity of the participants even when the issues are sensitive and delicate. She has the ability to hold and transform spaces to become settings for wisdom and insight for the participants. In so doing, she acts as a role model for effective leadership.

It started around seven years ago, when Henrik was teaching a group of Masters students at Hyper Island in Manchester. The students were presented with a brief from Greenpeace to create campaign ideas that placed pressure on companies that use palm oil connected to illegal deforestation in Southeast Asia. Henrik was moved by the project, but also realised that Greenpeace faced some hurdles in translating their intention to save the planet, into ideas that could lead to greater impact.

At first, Henrik worked for free at the London Office and hosted ideation workshops to develop radically new campaigning ideas. Greenpeace and Henrik and Fantastic Studios subsequently entered into a long term partnership to help develop more innovative campaign ideas for the organisation. Another goal was to strengthen and develop Greenpeace’s own capacity for innovation.

To satisfy both needs, Henrik and Jonas worked with the Greenpeace Mobilisation Lab to introduce a range of different training processes across the organisation globally, such as Human Centered Design, to equip staff with the tools they need.

There is now a global network of more than 400 facilitators that are equipped with the tools and processes to lead, boost the organisation’s creative process, and support campaign teams in developing relevant ideas.

“A few years down the line we are seeing the impacts of these trainings with project teams taking on co­-creation of ideas with communities as a key part of their planning, greater collaboration between teams internally, and the process Henrik introduced to staff being used to design Greenpeace’s long term strategy for the next 10 years.”

– Tracy Frauzel, Mobilisation Strategy Director, Mobilisation Lab at Greenpeace

“Many trainers can deliver content, but only some can ensure that participants fully internalise and master new material and put it into action. Henrik and Jonas delivered a world-class curriculum that empowered me and my colleagues with the skills needed to lead others through creative collaboration and idea development. We know because it’s already happening around the Greenpeace offices globally.”

– Michael Silberman, Global Director, Mobilisation Lab at Greenpeace

Vestas is the energy industry’s global partner on sustainable energy solutions and designs, manufactures, installs, and services wind turbines across the globe. In 2007 Vestas was facing a number of complex, interconnected challenges:

• A blurred strategic focus due to having too many projects and initiatives running in parallel
• No reporting structure to connect strategy with projects
• Underestimating the process of change and the role of communication in strategy execution
• Suffered from a low sense of urgency failing to grasp the seriousness of e.g. not reaching a customer loyalty target on a maturing market
• Had a low Project Management maturity and many of the projects had unclear timelines, moveable targets, no transparency, no handling of risks and lack of planned communication

We subsequently facilitated a process in which Vestas selected 12 strategic projects (MWBs) whose execution were prioritised ahead of all other projects. Each Battle was led by the organisation’s top talents and fully supported by the Group Management team. A Strategic Portfolio Management (SPM) capability was developed in parallel, whose team consisted of a 50/50 mix of external consultants and employees. Their role was to:

• Anchor and report the full portfolio of Battles with Executive Management.
• Align all Battles with one coherent project model
• Conduct professional reviews and project audits
• Execute portfolio risk management
• Monitor resource constraints and coordinate across the Battles
• Secure communication and change management efforts in Vestas, e.g. establishment of MWB intranet and the internal magazine MustWin

Thirdly, a Battle Support function or a Project Management Office (PMO) capability was developed to work closely with all the Battles. The team consisted of a 50/50 mix of external consultants and employees. The Support function helped the Battles to achieve results by offering methods, procedures, processes and tools within Communications and Change Management and Project Management.

After two years of ‘battles’, Vestas CEO Ditlev Engel, expressed his satisfaction in the following letter:

“First of all, I want you to know how impressed I am with the progress made in all 12 Battles. It has been fantastic to see the energy and dedication, which the entire Battle organisation has invested in securing the victory for these 12 cross-functional, cross-business unit projects.

The most important way to measure the success of the battles is by focusing on the financial results: Will the winnings actually lead to increased profits? And this is where I am exceptionally encouraged. The 12 Must-Win-Battles are creating savings and synergies that are worth [XXX] million Euros next year alone. These figures are directly reflected in the budget for 2009.

The outcome underlines the potential of working as one Vestas. […] I feel very privileged and proud to be in an organisation where people invest so much of their time and energy in creating real results and change.”

– Ditlev Engel, CEO and President, Vestas

When Malmö City Council centralised its communications activities, the goal was to create a department that could play a central role in meeting the city’s real challenges. From the outset, the new director wanted to focus on developing a highly functional organisational culture. He knew that culture was a valuable asset, even though it was hard to measure.

We worked in parallel on three levels: executive coaching, coaching the management team, and facilitating workshops with the whole department. The first phase defined the culture that they wanted to build and sustain, and started putting it into practice. Simple in principle, but complicated in action. The cultural components that grew out of the dialogues were used to heighten awareness and deepen ongoing conversations about organisational culture.

Central to the culture creation was feedback, supporting the creation of a learning environment. Finally, leadership development has played a key role in anchoring new ways of thinking into everyday organisational life.

During the process of successfully integrating the city council’s communication activities with the IT Department, the Communications Department grew from 23 to 45 people. The Communications Department is now an attractive workplace that is recognised for its ability to meet the city’s challenges while sustaining a thriving and collaborative work culture.