Module 19
To the team admin: Your special role in your company workshops continues; you are the leader! In each section of each session, play the videos at the right time, read out and share the text and instructions on screen, lead the activities, and record the outcomes from each. Don’t forget to allocate another team member as timekeeper to keep you on track!
What you need
A whiteboard, 3 flip charts, paper, post-its, break out spaces. For online teams, zoom breakouts and chat can be used in place of rooms and post-its.
How much time it takes
This workshop is designed to be undertaken as 3 separate intensive yet fun sessions, with a min. 20-minute break between each to mentally reset.
Change it up
Know how your team works best and customise the workshop for them. Longer breaks? More discussion? More breakouts. Do it!
Eliminating buy-in challenges
When J.C. Penney hired Apple executive Ron Johnson to lead a bold transformation, the strategy looked great on paper. He scrapped constant discounting in favour of everyday low prices, redesigned stores, and aimed to create a more premium experience.
But there was one major problem: their customers weren’t ready for it. The people who shopped there liked the coupons, the sales racks, the bargain hunt. And the staff — many of whom had spent years operating one way — didn’t understand how to sell in this new model.
The strategy wasn’t inherently wrong. But it failed to account for the human response. Sales plummeted, and within 18 months, Johnson was out.
It’s a common occurrence, strategies that look great on paper until they hit real people in the real world. We all know the patterns: resistance, misunderstandings, ‘this is just another initiative’, ‘that will never work here’.
But here’s the thing, no one knows your people and culture better than this group. The same leaders who will drive these changes also hold the insights you need to anticipate what might slow you down, and plan for it now, not later.
Think of this as mental rehearsal: if you can predict the challenges, you can prepare to overcome them.
60 minutes
Now we’re through Phase 1 and 2 and have a much better idea of what this 3P growth strategy is going to look like, we can get a lot more specific also with our change and buy-in planning. In small groups, for 20 minutes, work together to write on paper:
Likely buy-in challenges. Things that could affect uptake, engagement, or trust
For each, suggest mitigation actions, ways to neutralise or reduce resistance
Score how big a challenge this might be (1 being low – 4 being very high )
As you’re finished writing your top 3 to 5 challenges, pass them left to the group next to you to read. Keep up the passing until everyone has seen all the challenges.
Now have a 30 minute group discussion:
What level of change is feasible right now?
On the whole, how are our people doing, can they take more change?
What are some of the common issues that popped up that will continue to pop up in any new initiative?
How do we make change ok?
60 minutes
One reason strategies fail is not poor ideas, but poor timing. Too much at once, efforts that clash, fatigue from overloading the system and people.
Great execution isn’t about doing everything fast, it’s about doing the right things in the right order, at a pace the business can absorb.
In this session, we’ll build our shared milestones and momentum map: a clear view of what should happen, when, to deliver success over three years. Note, you will include different levels of detail for year 1, which is closer, and year 2 and 3, which you will know much less about now.
Stick up butchers paper one next to the other, stretching along the wall in a big line. Now, break the line up into 3 equal sections, one for each year. What you will have is timeline that runs along your wall and starts with a section for year 1, followed by year 2 and finally year 3.
As a group:
How long will it REALLY take to do that?
Activity: Being objective
Back in the earlier 2000s, Google noticed something strange.
They were hiring the smartest engineers in the world, giving them the best resources, but still seeing inconsistent results between teams. Some flew, some not as much.
So Google did what Google does, it measured.
It launched Project Aristotle, a deep-dive research study to understand what makes teams successful. The group on the project expected to find that the best teams had the highest individual IQs or the most skilled technical leads.
But that wasn’t it.
The number one predictor of a high-performing team?
Psychological safety: the ability for team members to speak up, take risks, admit mistakes, and be heard without fear.
And guess what? They weren’t measuring that before.
No dashboards, no KPIs, no leadership accountability.
It just wasn’t on the radar and so it wasn’t being managed.
Once they started tracking it with surveys, leadership training, and behavioural markers, it changed how teams operated.
Why? Because what gets measured gets understood.
And what is understood can be acted on in the right way.
Objectives or KPIs aren’t just numbers, they’re signals of what we value. If we want our 3P growth strategy to stay front and centre, we need to measure it accurately and frequently alongside core business objectives so success becomes visible and shared.
This session, you finish what you started way back in Phase 1 in your initial goals and objectives activity.
Back then, you set some initial business goals, underpinned by triple bottom line or 3P thinking, but you didn’t have the info or thinking in place to make them truly measureable and to set SMART objectives under them, to guide your way and measure your success.
You do that now.
Go back to your goals from Workshop 1:
10 minutes
Our first workshop for Phase 3 is now complete and so is most of the thinking and legwork that will inform our strategy, we don’t know if you feel it yet, but THIS IS GETTNG EXCITING! You’re nearly there, well done!
