Module 23
To the team admin: Welcome back! This is the final time you need to play your special workshop role; 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!
Activity: Ready to roll!
In 2011, Adobe made a bold move.
At the time, Adobe’s core business was selling packaged software — Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign — all delivered in boxed discs and one-off licenses. It was a successful model, but one with limitations: revenue was lumpy, updates were slow, and piracy was rampant.
So Adobe’s executive team made a radical decision: transition the entire business to a cloud-based subscription model. No more discs, no more one-off purchases. A complete reinvention of how the company created, sold, and supported its products.
From the outside, it sounded logical. But inside, it was likely terrifying.
The change could mean short-term revenue loss, a total rethink of operations, and a wave of internal resistance. Sales teams were probably hesitant, product teams would be stretched, investors likely panicked. The stock dropped more than 10%.
And yet, the leadership team stayed the course.
They knew they hadn’t just built a strategy, they’d built belief.
Before launching anything externally, they spent months aligning internally; making sure every team understood the why, and that every leader was equipped to answer the tough questions, guide their people, and hold the line.
They didn’t hand out a strategy and say ‘go’. They held workshops, simulations, and peer reviews. They mapped out tough conversations in advance. And they gave their senior leaders the tools and language to own the strategy with confidence so that when it went public, it wasn’t just the CEO carrying the message. It was everyone.
The result?
By 2017, Adobe had not only fully transitioned to the subscription model — it had increased its revenue significantly, and its stock price, and become a benchmark for digital reinvention.
Great strategy doesn’t survive on paper. It survives in the hands of leaders who own it, teach it, and carry it, all the way through.
In your business, those leaders have to be you!
In this workshop, your executive team will present the final strategy you’ve built over the past few months, shaped by the work you’ve all done along the way.
As Adobe learned, a strategy is only as strong as the people who carry it forward.
Here’s what you’re being asked to do today:
1. Be present
This is a key milestone, not a review meeting. It’s a moment of focus and alignment: watch closely, listen deeply, notice how it connects to your function, your people, your future.
2. Take note
As the strategy is shared, note what feels exciting, what’s unclear, and what needs discussion.
3. Ask the deeper question
Once the presentation ends, you’ll have space to ask questions, not just about what’s in the plan, but about what it means for how you lead.
Good questions might include:
What does this shift require of my team?
What’s going to challenge us most?
Where might we drift if we’re not careful?
4. Capture your commitment
At the end of this session, you will be asked to sign a document to make your commitment to doing everything in your power to ensure the successful roll out of this strategy over the next few years.
Too many businesses start and then drop the ball, get sick of trying, pivot wihtout thinking; this is you committing to make sure your business uses this strategy to keep moving towards the vision, goals and objective syou have set together, through this process.
Enoy this moment, it’s what you’ve been working towards.
10 minutes
The strategy is done. The plan is clear. What happens next depends on what you each do from here. It won’t always be easy. It won’t always go to plan.
But with commitment, consistency, and accountability, you can take this off the page and make this real.
