A multinational enterprise software corporation was about to embark on its journey to implement an entirely new global business strategy: The Intelligent Enterprise.
To successfully communicate and align its top leaders to this new strategy, the software company partnered with BTS to design and facilitate a critical CEO leadership summit where the top 120 global leaders came together to align and build a plan to execute the strategy.
After the summit, leaders would come away with an understanding of what was changing and why. The experience was designed so that leaders across all business units could consider the implications of these business shifts for their customers, teams, partners, and other stakeholders, and for themselves. BTS worked with the organization to co-create powerful virtual “breakout sessions” that would follow key strategy presentations, with a focus on capturing the company’s aspirations, apprehensions, and questions as well as extract meaningful insights that would be reported back to the Board.
The interactive sessions were built on BTS’ proprietary digital platform, “Pulse,” which allowed for secure, large-scale data collection and engagement of all participants during the virtual summit.
During the breakout sessions, leaders engaged in the following activities:
- Future Storming – a way for leaders to identify potential roadblocks to successfully executing the new strategy.
- Change Execution Workshop – a session for leaders to determine where there would be resistance to the new strategy, how to set a vision, and the first steps required for execution.
- Competitive Communication Activity – a video hunt where leaders uploaded and rated each other’s submissions on how they would communicate the strategy downward, cascading it throughout the company.
Following each of the sessions, BTS analyzed the data collected and provided an insights report that was presented back to the organization’s Board.
The report included observations from BTS and key information on the following areas:
- Leaders’ response to the new strategy
- Execution readiness
- Implications for customers, partners, and employees
- Commitments to action including how the corporation will inspire its people to execute the new strategy
Ultimately, the organization’s Board was amazed by how quickly participants were able to align around the new strategy and direction. Feedback from the summit indicated that the BTS led breakout sessions successfully allowed leaders to share their input, debate, and prioritize actions they must take to drive execution of the strategy.
Since the summit was delivered virtually, the company’s leaders and BTS facilitators were able to draw unique takeaways from how participants were reacting to the new strategy and what could be done to further support its adoption. These observational insights combined with analytical reports helped inform the Board, as well as track each participant’s action plan. The action plans, or a series of commitments leaders made to follow-through with after the summit, ensured long-term learning and meaningful execution of the strategy.
