Overview

Designed and facilitated a vision, mission, and alignment workshop to facilitate the strategic partnership between two companies in the human resources and recruiting space in Germany.

Two consultancies — one in HR, one in recruiting — wanted to reassess their strategic partnership after several years of working together. Over the course of their existing relationship, they’d built some processes and workflows, including a shared client base that could come to each for different needs. However, both parties weren’t certain whether these processes made sense in a strategic sense for their long term growth and collaboration, as well as for the capacity level and roles each individual wanted to undertake in the partnership.

Designed a hands-on activity inspired by board games, including crafting physical ‘game pieces’ representing the various stakeholders and flows: people, organizations, clients, and assets.

Each person had an allotted amount of time to map their vision for an ideal partnership using these pieces, paper, and pen.

Afterwards, each stakeholder had time to explain their vision, using their process map as a visual speaking aid.

• Physical and visual tools are a huge help for complex, multi-stakeholder conversations — they help make the abstract more concrete. People felt seen and heard.
• It was also fun! The open format of the tool allowed people to build maps that fit their individual modes of thinking.
• The tool helped them to communicate their ideal visions, as well as the more difficult topic of what they each didn’t want to do in the partnership (and thus wanted to outsource), just as important especially in smaller teams.
• This was one of my first bilingual workshops. Definitely a confidence booster to be able to facilitate complex activities in “Denglish”!

“It’s difficult when you’re ‘dancing at too many weddings,’* but we were able to make a good picture together.”
_{(*that’s German for “doing too many things at once / being in two places at once)}

“At the beginning I had the fear of 200 things to focus on... This workshop got us to talk about the next steps but also put ourselves on the same page. The meta and high level now has more clarity."

“I’m glad we got to do this. It’s tough to find space to breathe and look into the future when pressured by everyday business.”

• Top