Our work
Innovation training and solving a genuine business problem in 2 days
Custom-designed innovation leadership training, plus a range of keystone innovation templates and canvases.
The challenge
One of Tasmania’s leading utilities was facing new market competition, as well as internal change issues. They needed to improve not only how they executed on innovation within the organisation, but also how they approached innovation leadership, as an ongoing capability.
Our approach
Ben and James partnered with The Upfront Thinking Company to custom-design two all-day off-site training days for the senior leadership team. The Upfront Thinking Company had already been engaged by this utility on a strategy refresh piece, and the next step was to activate their new strategy by raising the leadership team’s capabilities in inspiring and stewarding internal creativity and innovation.
The training we provided was based on our extensive experience in both training and executing with Design Thinking, visual storytelling, as well as user-centred design methods and frameworks. This particular training program called for bespoke elements that would find the right blend of free-ranging creativity, business strategy, and data-backed rigour, including a business-oriented Design Thinking process popularised by Jeanne Liedtka in her book Designing for Growth.
The main outcomes in the training were:
- Greater proficiency in exploring business problems from different perspectives within the organisation, using various stakeholder interviewing methods
- Analysing, defining and (re)framing problems to arrive at more insightful problem statements and design challenges
- Increasing the range of creative idea generation, for more innovative solutions
- Decreasing business risk and increasing confidence with simple prototyping and testing
- Developing more compelling strategic arguments for business cases
What’s more, this training was designed so that the leadership team could apply real business challenges to what they learned right from the start, and exit with a prototype of a new business solution, ready to try, test and learn.
Along the way, the leadership team got to use a range of keystone innovation templates that we created specifically for this training program, based on our own large collection of templates, canvases and frameworks.
These included
- Project brief - to ensure a team would have all the essential ingredients of a successful innovation project
- Research plan - to help leadership and management work with other teams to define the most effective ways to invest time and resources in the right research
- Design challenge - to help develop a more insightful actionable language when it came to articulating innovation challenges
- Concept pitch - to give the leadership team a simple consistent format
One of the biggest insights the group reported from the training was the ability to explore and reframe problem spaces together with staff, rather than the existing modus of trying to race ahead and execute on a top-down pre-existing solution, wrapped as a goal.
Being able to pitch innovation concepts as business cases to each other was also a refreshing new format for them, rather than always opting for ‘death by PowerPoint’.
The outcome
As a result of the training, and the business challenges that the leadership team chose to tackle, together they forged a solution to kick-start a Customer Experience (CX) Improvement Network of operational team members to harvest, identify, and progress CX improvement ideas throughout the organisation.
What made this revolutionary for this utility was the silo-busting cross-departmental way of working, and the change in mindset toward staff, to empower them to self-prioritise more granular CX improvements.
Photo credit: American Public Power Association on Unsplash
It was really useful to work together as an SLT group to identify and solve a business problem; in practice this is usually driven by an individual SLT member. We spent dedicated time as an SLT articulating the correct problem statement. As a business we often just go straight ahead to solution mode, and end up solving the wrong problem (or don’t circle back to see if anything changed).
We’ve boosted capacity in loads of teams...
Here are some organisations that Bright Pilots has been privileged to run training sessions and masterclasses for:
Our services
We’d be excited to partner with you, to help you overcome challenges with your strategy, your offering, or complexity in your organisation.
Facilitation
We run workshops for better discovery, strategy, scoping, and innovation, whether it’s in the room, Zoom, or anything in between.
Visualisation
We turn complexity into clarity, and increase your audience’s engagement with illustrations, strategy maps and diagrams, live scribing, and other visual communications.
Coaching
We help your team work better together by using our very own innovation performance coaching program as a way for them to solve a current challenge, and pitch the solution to their leadership.
Training
We build your organisation’s capabilities in ‘21st Century’ skills that are crucial for work now, and for what’s next, including strategy, facilitation, and visualisation.
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