Future designing strategic workshop at an architectual visualization studio

29/08/2024

The team of Áron Lőrincz Ateliers - ALA (https://www.instagram.com/aron_lorincz_ateliers/, https://ala.hu/ )  accomplished a serious amount of work and came back with very concrete agreements and important lessons learned from their two-day strategic workshop.

Most important goals for the team - their best hopes:

🎯 Common understanding and agreements on the future of the company: clients, services, brand, what the company will look like in the future, priorities. 

🎯 Agreements about their brand identity and how they differentiate themselves.

🎯 Setting strategic priorities and goals. 

🎯 Tangible outcomes - visible, written and agreed. 

🎯 Getting to know each other - time to talk, exchange ideas. 

Most important strategic outcomes for them:

They...

  • identified and agreed on the company's strengths and opportunities, USP, determined their market position how they differentiate themselves and what resources they can build on, 
  • identified and agreed on areas for future development,
  • analysed their client base in detail and formulated their specific, current value proposition,
  • defined a concrete future for themselves - expressed in terms of future achievements, along which they can develop a detailed strategy and action plans later on,
  • developed strategic pillars and concrete objectives, all focused on future deliverables,
  • got to know each other , each other's thoughts, motivations better, and had deep discussions on different topics.

💡Personal lessons learned by team members:

"Writing down your thoughts is key - it's not enough to just imagine or talk about something."

 "Our understanding of our future became much clearer, more specific and unified compared to what we had in mind before the workshop."

"Even the obvious has become clearer and more tangible."

"The repetition and return to a topic is not only useful but also necessary for a deeper understanding."

⚠️What made the efficient and furitful work possible:

  • The attitude, motivation and cooperation of the team.
  • The safe, people-centred, trusting environment in which they work.
  • The highly empathetic, flexible and inclusive leader.
  • As a result of all the first three: the courage and commitment of team members to share their individual thoughts and feelings.
  • As an external facilitator, I kept the team focused, providing a framework and structure for working together to reach consensus agreements and meet their goals. This allowed the team to focus on their creative work and themselves as a team.
  • And the beautiful environment has also helped the team to step out of their everyday lives and dream a new future for themselves.

🪄How did I prepare? What did I focus on?

  • Accurate and very specific goal setting with the team.
  • I built on structured, focused, interrelated tasks, situations, based on each other, which constantly synthesized the previous steps and continuously improved and made the picture for the team clearer and more and more specific.
  • A varied methodology that included elements of design thinking and solution-focused approach.
  • I generated discussions that brought deeper ideas, thoughts, motivations to the surface and led common understandings and real, consensus-based agreements.
  • I sought to combine creative artistic/visual, as well as verbal and written activities, and structured the two days so I could place the team in situations where the creative community of artists - whose main language of communication is the visual, pictorial world - could unfold in words, and produce common WRITTEN agreements, messages and outcomes, while maintaining enthusiasm and joy in the work.

🎨🖌️At at the end of the workshop, they expressed what the future means to them in a beautiful collective creation based on what they had put together in two days. The picture is a perfect combination of art and strategic thinking: first they planned, strategized and then worked in coordination sometimes communicating, with each other, sometimes silently, on their own, independentl, freely, showing their own artistic vision. In the picture, each team member worked on a triangle. And the whole is much more than just sum of the parts. 


#StrategyWorkshop #Futuredesign #CompanyDevelopment #Vision


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