Developing the strategy together
Togetherness with a strategy - a story about onsite and online collaboration
CASE Malmö Live
the Challenge
To engage artists, musicians, producers and technicians across the organisation in a highly collaborative process resulting in the strategy for Malmö Live for the coming five years.
the Outcome
With broad involvement through online and onsite facilitation, all employees took part and were invited to contribute in the co-creation of the company strategy. By working together across, we harnessed the collective intelligence in creating the strategy as well as anchoring it.
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.
A history map tracking the origins of Malmö Live, the Concert Hall and Malmo Symphony Orchestra back to its roots.
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.
Collecting learning and defining current state.
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)
