Project
Individual futures of employees based on the corporate purpose.
Challenge
How can the team be aligned with the company’s purpose, an often abstract formulation that comes from upper management? How can it be made more accessible to each employee, individually and maybe even on a personal level? This was the central question of Nordlicht Management Consultants’ annual strategy meeting in 2021. Futures Probes supported them with the facilitation of a four-hour workshop designed to explore the company’s purpose and to create individual futures.
Approach
Based on the Futures Thinking method, the workshop was divided into four phases:
PHASE 1
An initial exploration of the company’s purpose and its underlying guiding principles were the rationale for embarking the team on a future journey.
PHASE 2
After working out their own interpretations of the company’s purpose, employees were given several guiding questions, such as “How do you imagine a world in which Nordlicht Management truly and absolutely lives up to its purpose and guiding principles?” These helped them create future worlds. For this activity, the participants were divided into smaller groups, or “committees from the future”, that would then present their ideas to the rest of the team.
PHASE 3
Afterwards, each participant was asked to reinterpret those future worlds and use them as an inspiration to work out their own future, which was facilitated by a “futures template”.
PHASE 4
The results were then visualised by the team of Futures Probes. The individual futures were illustrated as future portraits, making them tangible and thus, bringing them closer to life.
Outcome
- Common exchange and alignment around the company’s purpose
- Development of individual understandings of the company’s purpose and how it can be linked and applied to one’s own daily work
- Creation of common and individual images of the future based on the corporate purpose
- Making images of the future tangible through visualisation
”The workshop inspired and shed light into each employees' visions of the future. This inspired the foundation for our internal strategic work. In the further days of our strategy meetings, we kept coming back to our images of the future, using them as guides and constantly referring to them.
Raphael Meyer-LandrutManaging Director of Nordlicht Management Consultants
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