The project at hand was embedded in a company wide strategy transformation process. I was assigned to this project for more than five months.

The managers were very open to a variety of workshop techniques, allowing widening the scope for possible solutions and the subsequent focus on very targeted measures.

One of the workshop techniques is called the “open world café” a highly effective method for yielding excellent results for out-of-the-box solutions. We have prepared a set up with “coffee” tables. On each of the coffee tables we placed a card with a problem field as a topic e.g.: problems in interfaces, resources, management, teams, means or whatever is specific to your organization.

Employees were motivated to comment on these problems and wander around to other tables and write additional remarks. This way we can assure that everyone has the possibility to contribute his positive and negative comments and thus giving employees a voice in the overall process.