Skip to main content
The EMEA Corporate Communications team for a global pharmaceutical company commissioned two idea generation sessions at their annual conference in Berlin. The brief was to get 80 people networking, collaborating, and creating a shared vision of the future, with the output feeding directly into the next day's planning and goal setting.
Thinking big to create a shared vision of the future
We worked with the EMEA Corporate Communications team for a global pharmaceutical company to run two idea generation sessions as part of their annual conference.
Two Creative Huddle facilitators led the group through two high-energy sessions to consider the future and create a strategy in response.
We first asked people to “Walk the Line” – to take a position according to their interpretation of the future and their perceived readiness to tackle it.
We then helped the group form small teams to create a roadmap to the future by considering several alternate scenarios.
Finally, we led them through a fast action planning process and they pitched big ideas to their colleagues.
Many ideas were generated, setting up the following day for planning and goal setting to turn some of the best ideas into reality.
The biggest design challenge for a conference ideation session at this scale is managing the energy. 80 people in a room can either generate genuine collective momentum or produce a polite performance of collaboration that disappears the moment the session ends. The difference sits in the physicality of the format and the discipline of the action planning.
Two facilitators running high-energy sessions, with Walk the Line as the opener and fast action planning at the close, is the formula I keep coming back to for groups in this range. The lesson worth recording: never end an ideation session without a clear handover to the work that follows it. The day after carries the value.
Most work like this starts with a 30-minute call to understand the team, the context, and what good would look like. From there we agree the shape of the work together.
