In mid 2018 we were able to work together with Skillsgarden on a one day corporate workshop in Davos.
Skillsgarden is a consulting company based in Winterthur. They focus on supporting skill development for a sustainable change to foster innovation and creativity. They are experts in enabling growth of psychological safety which is a key performance factor in teams and therefore for companies.
We supported the Skillsgarden Team as facilitators for one day of their cultural change workshop. The workshop was designed for around 85 participants consisting of the top-management of an international company with over 5000 employees. Additional to the general facilitation support, we designed 90 minutes of the day ourselves. We let the participants experience agile product development by guiding them through a customized version of the Stanford Wallet Exercise. The exercise was adapted to let the participants work in groups on the task.
By listening to an input of the workshop leader from Skillsgarden we could experience first hand how an important topic like cultural change that everyone has heard of before can be introduced. He brought everyone on the same page without boring the audience while adding a new interesting perspective to the discussion.
This workshop enabled us to experience a complete new environment. We not only saw the differences of workshop facilitation between a scientific and a corporate setting but also got a little peak at the challenges faced by top level management and how to tackle them. We were surprised to see the enormous energy and enthusiasm that the top level managers put in designing new disruptive ideas in a topic not related to their core business. We loved how our input was perceived and that we were able to deliver together with the Skillsgarden team and the CEO of the company the key messages of agile product development.
