I am in the process of devising and will be facilitating a 1 day business strategy workshop involving senior managers from different parts of the business to ultimately devise 3-7 core strategies to support a parituclar business unit's vision re: profit growth. The brief is to make it fun, interactive and creative. I've read about the Walt Disney strategy and wondered if anyone has used this, if so, how? Also, are there any other exercises you may have used to facilitate the creation process? Thank you!
Niki Price
3 Responses
an icebreaker
Hi there
I’m running a strategic planning session next week and will be running the following exercise as an ice breaker – hopefully it will work for you to (it works best with about 10-15 people).
You can also explore the themes further to make it more than an icebreaker.
The exercise is about going in the right/same direction and the first part is completed with eyes closed. You give the group a minute (with eyes closed) to get their bearings and to decide which direction they think is North. After the minute you ask them, (still with eyes closed) to point to ‘north’. Then, once everyone is pointing, they can open their eyes to see where the others are pointing. Then, each person gets a few seconds to persuade the group why where they are pointing to is north. Then, people get a chance to change their minds and revise where they are pointing. People who have changed get a chance to say why they changed and people that didn’t say why they didn’t. The idea is to get everyone pointing in the same direction. You could then have a discussion about how that exercise links into developing a clear strategy. In the game people will be pointing based on their own frames of reference and not on a shared view and sometimes, if a strategy isn’t clear people can ‘plough their own furrow’.
If you want to extend this session, you can develop this even further by having a compass and seeing if anyone was pointing in the right direction and if they did, were they able to persuade the others to point in the right direction? If they had got it right but weren’t able to persuade, why was that? etc
I hope I’ve explained that well enough to be of value.
Good luck
Disney in Practice
Hi Niki,
Disney Strategy: Used it many times, it is a truly great way to generate new ideas and ways of dealing with issues/problems etc. In fact, you could use it for almost any situation where you want to generate ideas or look at developing strategies etc. It also meets your ‘fun’ criteria.
I’ll e-mail you the process…too big to fit in here!
If all else fails, go to the NLP University site (Robert Dilts has done a lot of work on developing the strategy, my suggestions above are based on his work). Go to the NLP encyclopaedia page , click volume ‘D’ and scroll down to the Disney page.
You can print off this section of the encyclopaedia too! http://nlpuniversitypress.com/index.html
Another technique I have used is the Lotus Blossom, details at these sites:
http://members.optusnet.com.au/~charles57/Creative/Techniques/lotus.htm
Other techniques you could use are Mind Maps etc.
Good luck!
Paul
Alefounder Associates
Delivering Business Benefits through Coaching & Training
e-mail address
Niki,
If you need the paper, e-mail me, I can’t find you details!
Regards
Paul