AMCOF is a traditional engineering company in the oil and gas field operations business, with over 500 employees. The company’s managing director had recently been appointed to run a new services contract and he wanted to find a way of increasing the involvement of his managers in the success of this project and of increasing their team effectiveness. In addition, at some stage he wanted to involve a few key customers to ensure that the direction taken by his team would be in alignment with their own priorities.

The One-Day Strategy Workshops

Five one-day strategy workshops were planned to ensure that all the key managers could be involved. Each workshop was structured as follows: in the morning a manual idea generation / mapping technique was used to surface strategic issues; then in the afternoon the emergent model was further developed using Group Explorer.

Each workshop began with the participants spending a little over an hour generating material - writing down their thoughts about the strategic issues facing the organisation onto large adhesive oval ‘post it’ notes. Typically, over 120 ovals were generated in this way.

As a means of re-energizing them and extending their thinking, they were then invited to a) identify ways of achieving some of the statements on the wall, b) consider possible practical problems, and c) put more arguments up about why particular issues seemed to be important.

Whilst an external facilitator ran the idea generation session, an internal facilitator, who already had some experience with using the software, captured all the material in real time into the computer software.

After a coffee break, a quick review of the clusters was followed by a session to examine each cluster in more detail. Here, the structure of the cluster was examined, with super-ordinate statements being moved to the top of the cluster and more detailed options to the bottom. The statements were also linked together with arrows to show influences, presumed causality and implications. As this process took place, participants began to notice that they had different interpretations of a particular statement and therefore new material was added to elaborate the different meanings.

By the end of the morning, the groups had on average around two hundred statements on the wall, with links between them captured in the computer. The morning session ended with the participants expressing their preferences with coloured sticky dots. They were asked to consider the material from two angles: which issues were (a) the most important, and (b) the most appropriate to work on that afternoon.

Modelling Using Group Explorer

During the lunch break, the facilitators set up a number of mini maps in the computer that replicated the various clusters on the wall. This helped to ensure that after lunch participants were able to transfer their attention from the wall to the model on the projected computer screen and to trust that the computer model was simply a copy of the wall picture.

The first step after lunch was to explore how all of the key issue clusters and the emergent goals fitted together. Group Explorer was able to display the numerous relationships (between and within clusters) more easily because it could bring into view only the statements and links of interest to a particular kind of analysis, with the remainder of the material being readily accessible when required. As the participants began to gain confidence in the computer model, trusting that the facilitators had captured their material accurately, they began to refer less and less to the wall picture.

To aid navigation around the model, an overview map was created and worked on as a priority. This just displayed the cluster names (key issues), the associated emergent goals and their interlinkage. This summary picture was to become the first draft of a strategy map, showing goals and the key strategic issues that might later be converted into strategies. It was easy to edit and amend the model ‘on-line’ with the group’s involvement, moving statements around the screen, making or changing links, editing statements, or changing categories by using different colours and fonts. In this way, goals identified in the morning’s session could be re-assigned as key issue statements and vice-versa. Also, changes made at the summary picture level were automatically reflected in the more detailed model views, and vice-versa.

Once the group felt comfortable with the overview strategy map, they began working on individual clusters of issues, in order of the priority established by the preferencing process before lunch. The group would begin by considering the issue cluster on the screen, before launching into an animated discussion about the issues, raising new ideas, amending existing ones, and adding new links. Each participant would naturally tend to check that their own material was faithfully recorded, before they began to consider this material in the context of others. All of the new material was captured in the model and cross links made to other parts of the model when appropriate. The participants appeared to revel in the process of discussion being captured rather than forgotten, as in other meetings. They could see the changes being made in real time and correct any ‘mistakes’ that either of the facilitators made. The process of correcting / editing was critical because it usually implied that others in the group wanted to present alternative interpretations.

During each of the discussion periods, the lead facilitator worked hard to try to ensure all participants were able to contribute by bringing quieter participants into the conversation, preventing over-dominant group members from ‘taking over’ and ensuring all key actors could be heard. In addition, soundings were regularly taken from the client to ensure that he was comfortable with the general focus of the meeting.

In the final stage of the workshop each issue cluster was reviewed and the group identified which of the potential strategic options embedded in the cluster were most preferred. For this purpose, the preferencing option in Group Explorer was used to distribute ‘resources’ to establish the four best options. The results were then reviewed by the group and those gaining the highest resources were placed in a new category labelled key strategic options. The facilitators were able to use Group Explorer to check the level of agreement or consensus amongst the group. The anonymity of the preferencing option in Group Explorer provides an important advantage compared with the use of manually applied self-adhesive spots, preventing ‘tactical voting’ and providing a genuine measure of the level of agreement among the group. The workshop closed with a brief explanation of what was to follow - setting clear expectations about the next part of the journey.

Most of the participants left with a sense of achievement, many of them thanking the facilitators for ‘a much more productive day than was usually the case.’ As they left the room, many commented that the process was interesting because it had not been evaluative. Rather ‘every contribution was taken seriously, even if it then gradually got modified as others in the group worked on the statement as if it were theirs’. One participant commented: ‘I don’t think I’ve ever paid so much attention to what my colleagues said before - I think it’s because others built on my arguments and I built on theirs in a constructive way, instead of the usual point scoring.’

Strategy Implementation

Each of the workshops was reviewed with the client immediately after it closed. The client often observed on these occasions that participants who had been expected to cause trouble didn’t, whilst those signalled as quiet were often quite vociferous. Careful design of process was seen to have paid off in changing significantly normal patterns of behaviour.

Following the five workshops, the facilitators worked to link the models resulting from each of them together. The next stage was how to get firm and committed agreement to actions and priorities. There were far too many key options from the workshops for them all to be implemented. In addition, the managing director was still keen to involve a couple of the senior managers from one of the organisation’s major customers in the strategy process, in order to forge a closer relationship with the customer organisation and better understand its priorities.

A two-stage process was designed. The first stage (a single day) was with the customer’s senior managers to show them the process and get their contributions. The second stage lasted two days and was designed to help AMCOF’s senior managers decide what should be done. The customer workshop began with an introduction and overview of the key issues already surfaced and how they related to each other. Then the customers were invited to contribute to the model and to express their preferences as to which issues they regarded as most important both in the long and the short term. The preferencing helped to focus the workshop on those areas which the customers felt were most critical and a comparison with the preferences already expressed by AMCOF’s senior managers provided material for a fruitful debate among the group. The customers suggested some useful ideas for collaborative working practices and gave the management team some useful insights and different perspectives.

In the second stage workshop with the senior managers, strategic intent and action programmes were agreed upon and responsibilities assigned to those most appropriate.

The managing director was now keen to set up a means of checking progress on the actions that had been agreed. As his staff were scattered around the country, having regular meetings on progress would be difficult. He was conscious that managers were unable to have casual chats in the corridor and so there was no informal mechanism for updating one another on the progress in implementing strategic actions. Moreover, the results of the strategy workshops had suggested that some review of the current structure and job tasks was required - changes needed to be made.

He therefore decided that he would restructure the division to follow, in principle, the structure of the strategy map expressing the strategic intent. His aim was to set up a series of one to one meetings where he would use the strategy model as a means of providing each of his senior managers with strategic objectives for their area. In addition, any new material in terms of tasks or responsibilities that surfaced through these meetings could be added into the model, and changes made. He would also be able to use the model to show them how their tasks and targets related to those of his other senior managers. Following the restructuring of the organisation, each senior manager would be given the task of putting into place that part of the strategy that related to their own function. They would use the model to remind them of their responsibilities and flag progress.

However, it was clearly essential that the managers be given direct access to the strategy model via the organisation’s networked computer system. This would help them to record progress and any changes to the strategy that would become necessary due to changed circumstances, and also to review the progress and decisions made in related parts of the organisation. As a result, the managing director promoted the project to the next level of the organisation to develop a company-wide strategy and an IT strategy. Many of the tools and techniques have since been extensively used within the organisation for strategic problem solving.