Introduction
The year is three and a half years from now. Three and a half years ago you started your new job as the Online Service Executive Producer, and you're attending a glittering awards ceremony - the inaugural Local Government Digital Awards, and you're receiving the award for the Best Online Service, which was voted for Eurovision Song Contest-stylee by a combination of your industry peers and the citizens who use your website and digital service. You are going to write your acceptance speech for the award.
This is an in-person creative visioning exercise for you to work through with your team. The end task for the activity will be for you all to write your individual award acceptance speeches to share with each other, and collectively create an Action Plan to lead you in that direction.
The activities undertaken in this exercise should not be a surprise to the team on the day you meet for it; the team should be encouraged to spend some personal work time in advance of the meeting thinking about their own answers to the questions being asked as preparation - the in-person meeting should be a middle point along a process, it should not be the beginning of it.
Some of the activities involve splitting up into small groups of three. Whilst it does not make any assumptions about the size of the team, obviously if you're a team of four people then splitting up into groups of three isn't going to work. If you are indeed such a small team that splitting into groups of three will be silly, then consider whether there are other teams in the organisation engaged in related work to your own that it might be effective to combine with.
Although the scenario presented is that of a new manager kicking off their work with a team they've just joined, the exercise is applicable to any team at any point in its lifecycle.