Retail sector

"Painting The Picture" - From unsolvable problems to sustainable solutions
The digital TV and web revolution put a lot of pressure on the BBC News Service production processes. 24-hour cover meant a 10-fold increase in production over a 7-year period. There was a history of system design work over the years, conducted by external consultants and resisted by those impacted. The project team decided that this time it needed to be different with participative redesign work done by the News team themselves. VISTA helped the project team design and facilitate all the key meetings.

The basic plan was to

• Initially involve people from every team across Radio and TV News in planning the project and invite them to "do a good piece of investigative journalism on themselves".
• Track some key news stories as they were produced by keeping a diary of the unfolding work
• Map out the production process, as it currently existed, using the diary information
• Develop redesign recommendations

This was developed to add in three additional aspects

• A reframing of the problems using Polarity Management
• A review of the output of one of the stories by the editorial team
• A series of implementation workshops to build on initial design ideas and develop more detailed plans

Start to 'Make it Happen'
Under Greg Dyke the BBC had an inspiring change programme called 'Make it Happen'. The News team wanted to involve a significant number of people in working together on this. They started by planning for a large 2-day event which became 2 one-day events to enable more people to be involved.

The design team wanted a sense that people had been heard and that something will happen soon. They felt it was important to have fun and create a strong sense of shared ownership with tangible plans for teams to take forward.

The event used the 7 BBC vision themes and using a combination of appreciative inquiry into what is already happening and envisioning a desired future they developed plans to take forward. VISTA worked with a design team to plan the events and facilitated them with Gary Austin.

"How do we create a more inspiring place to work?"

Working in partnership with Inside Outreach we provided shadow support for a design process and facilitated a large-scale meeting of 450 Service Centre employees. The intention for the event was to act as a launching point and a symbolic shift from Corporate Centre to Service Centre.

Prior to the large scale meeting of 450 Service centre employees the Executive team from the Body Shop met to work on and design service principles for the Service Centre.

The principles were designed to be a simple framework within which people would work. They were not at this stage unmoveable Ð they were there to give the large staff event something to work on and within but were open in the meeting to be embellished, challenged and amended.

"Working together to energise our purpose, performance and passion for service excellence."

This was a working meeting for almost 800 Clifford Chance Partners to enable them to get a clearer understanding of their strategy. They arrived in London on a Friday afternoon and spent Friday evening and all day Saturday developing ideas and actions.