Situation: A very large federal government agency knew that it had reached a tipping point. It could no longer conduct business as usual if it wanted to meet the needs and expectations of the American public. Its strategic plan read more as a tactical plan, cataloguing the incremental improvements that would be made to existing programs. A special board with oversight responsibility believed that the agency’s strategic planning efforts would benefit from being grounded in a vision. They decided to sponsor a visioning workshop with personnel from one of the agency’s regional divisions to gain insights that were grounded by the perspectives of people who had day-to-day experience of its work.
Approach: RGsquared partnered with the special oversight board’s staff and the regional division leadership to design a visioning workshop that could deliver meaningful insights in a day and a half. While regional staff may have met one another, they had never worked together, and they had certainly not worked together with the special board members who were political appointees. RGsquared designed the workshop to accelerate the team-building process by preparing participants with pre-workshop reading assignments and focusing the working sessions on development of a presentation. The reading assignments were thought-provoking studies about the future which gave everyone a common vocabulary and a shared frame of reference. The work product was a simple set of electronic templates that each team was asked to complete and present, as a team, to the entire group. An iterative process of developing the presentation, receiving input, and revising the presentation allowed the teams to refine their thinking and achieve greater clarity around their proposals.
Result: The visioning workshop delivered a compelling future vision narrative that described a vital and vibrant agency that is able to effectively use technology to deliver a higher and more consistent level of service to the American people. By taking a big picture view of the future possibilities for this agency, the group was able to see how the two key levers for change – physical infrastructure and technology – are intertwined. Its legacy as an agency that delivered its services by having people come to an office meant that it had many locations which were near its constituents. Technology promised to free not only constituents but also the agency from needing to maintain these offices, but the visioning process recognized how challenging this would be for an organization that had long prided itself on being “close” to its customers. This narrative was used as the basis for the special board’s report to the agency and to Congress on developing a strategic plan that has the potential to transform the way the agency works.
