You may have been involved with workshops whose purpose was to “breathe life” into your organisation’s mission statement or, perhaps, to create a mission statement. Hopefully this exercise didn’t achieve the opposite and require the application of CPR. Here’s a link to a web tool that may help with that task next time.
Business planning shouldn’t be difficult. A good meaningful business plan should be able to fit onto a single page. Sure, A4 may be a bit small, so poster size may be a more worthwhile and useful target.
I love posters as communication tools. However I exclude from that statement any attachment to “science posters”. Many of these are just awful things that defy most laws of effective communication and also a few of the laws of physics.
We’re told that a picture is worth 1,000 words. This is because of the emotions that it induces and also the stories that can be told around it. An effective poster is also a picture, particularly if it contains less than 1,000 words.
I’m also a big fan of corporate storytelling, and will focus on that at some other time.
If you’re interested in getting some meaningful, effective and visual results from your next planning workshop, whether for your organisation or your team, here are some brilliant tools you can use. And they’re either free or extremely low cost, depending on how much you want!
I think they’re pretty straightforward tools too, and if you need a hand figuring out how you could use them, please give me a call.
A former colleague of mine once flew to Auckland to attend a two-day planning meeting. He had not long joined our company, which had offices in several centres around the country. The meeting was held in a conference venue close to the airport. He arrived a few minutes after the scheduled start date and was ushered in to join one of the tables of participants as the keynote speaker finished their introduction, setting the scene for the day’s proceedings.
I caught up with him a couple of days later and asked him how the meeting had gone.
“It was just fantastic!” he said. “The keynote speaker was inspirational.”
“But here’s the thing. While I was doing introductions at morning tea, I realised that I was in the wrong meeting. But by that stage I was so into their mission statement, I had to stay until lunch…”