The Future of Communication

Starfish Taylor builds the Future of Communication

The Future Of Communication

The Challenge

Client: Confidential | 8 X 1 day Vision Workshops | Houston, Aberdeen, Dubai, Jakarta, Houma, Layfayette

SCRIBE-LAFAYETTE-STARFISHTAYLOR

This Fortune 500 company was looking towards the future of communication and collaboration based on trends executive management wanted to look at in Social Media. The key question surrounded what aspects of these could be beneficial to their workforce and was there sufficient support to justify a Pilot project. The company is already seen as a leader in Knowledge Management and its IT infrastructure is advanced. Starfish Taylor was hired to bring a very strong fun-factor to the table and design a series of engaging workshops to gather grassroots views on what that future should look like. There was to be no mention of the actual tools used internally or the social media tools externally available such as Facebook and Twitter, so participants were not biased. The outputs from the series of workshops were used to build a recommendation by the sponsoring team to the EVP sponsor.

Our Design

Eight, 1-Day Workshops In Major Client Hubs Around The World

Focus on Exploring the Social Media Landscape

Starfish Taylor strategically designed a series of 8 one-day workshops that took participants through a journey – current state to desired future state.

We started by capturing key facts from each participant in the form of a Matrix, so those final outcomes could be looked at by age, sex, length of tenure etc. Each participant was asked for their own point-of-view about how they communicate and collaborate both at work and outside. These narratives were shared in teams, and then commonalities, surprises, and key learnings shared with the entire group. Teams were mixed and our workshop design allowed them to take a step back and delve into the barriers within the workplace and how external key elements may be used to overcome them. A flash-future was developed from this first series of modules.

A history of communication was presented and participants were given time to reflect and predict what key things would change in the future and when those changes would occur. We switched back to the current state and small teams described what works best in the outside world and why. We then switched forward to 2020 and had teams build realistic visions of the future and the key solutions that would be required to enable that future.

The Outputs

Achievements

A final workshop with the sponsor team was hosted to review the results of the 8 voice-of-customer workshops, synthesize all workshop outcomes, and build a business case for the future. Starfish Taylor wrote an Executive Summary and detailed report of what was learned through each workshop along with our key recommendations and a set of Infographics built from analysing the information acquired through the workshops. A set of Actions were built for the functions sponsoring the project (Internal Communications and Knowledge Management) and a strong set of recommendations developed for other functions and groups within the company were improvement could be achieved based on what the workshop participants brought up.

Deliverables

The final outputs included:

  • Executive Summary of the overall project
  • Starfish Taylor designed graphic illustrations and graphic scribe generated through the project
  • Set of Recommendations
  • Infographics of key information
  • Videos and Photo’s from the 8 workshops
  • Report for each workshop
  • Media Package of all material generated during the project