Start 2021 with a Strategy Mapping Engagement
Get everyone in your business on the same page.
Really, on the same page.
The perfect new year’s resolution for your business: get everyone in the company on the same page.
But how?
You could build a strategy deck, and email it to your colleagues. Or, you could design a beautiful brochure and hope people read it and believe it. Or, you could assume that everyone knows what’s going on, and just skip the alignment process altogether.
Here’s a better idea: engage in a strategy illustration workshop with Visual Ink. Co-develop a compelling map of your strategy so that all of your stakeholders can see and understand what’s going on.
What’s the goal of a strategy illustration?
This engagement is designed to help visually articulate and answer the most important 3 questions your stakeholders have:
Where are we today? What’s the current state of our business, including limitations, opportunities?
Where are we going? What’s the vision for a future state of our business?
How do we get there? What are the key elements that will get us to the future state?
If your strategy is already well defined, this workshop will focus on clarifying and amplifying the message, so it’s super clear and easy to understand.
If your strategy still needs some work, this is the perfect place to draw out key elements and pull it all together.
What happens in a virtual strategy illustration engagement?
Step 1 is to get the right set of stakeholders on a video call for a 30-60 minute data dump.
One of our business artists will facilitate the discussion and deliver an initial concept sketch within 48 hours.
From there we iterate multiple times until both the design and the content tell the right story. It should be intuitive enough that someone could understand the full strategy in five minutes and complex enough to be able to use it in a much longer conversation with key stakeholders.
When relevant, for example in joint sales account planning, many clients chose to pull their customers into the process. This occurs once we have illustrated the core concepts and gotten input from all the right business units and functions. Customer alignment and trust accelerates when they have a compelling strategic visual to react to and give input on!
A final full color visual takes anywhere from ten days to two months, depending on how fast you need to move.
The final illustration is formatted for use in standard PPT presentations as well as for printing. Many clients opt for a sequenced and scripted version of the visual, perfect for telling the story in stages.
What does the resulting illustration look like?
Here are just a few of the resulting illustrations:
At a glance, they can look simple…even cartoonish. But during the workshop we ensure that the fine details of your strategy are baked into the drawing. Viewers will typically see themselves and their concerns represented in the illustration.
This is the fastest (and the most fun!) way to get your stakeholders on the same page.
Guaranteed.
Visual Ink clients are typically delighted (and relieved!) to have a story telling device that is so easy to communicate.
Presentations, web content, posters… the resulting illustrations can manifest in a variety of deliverables designed around your communications plan.
