Collecting your award - a creative visioning exercise

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 award acceptance speeches to share with each other.

What did you miss before you arrived?

You're the new manager and you want to make your mark and demonstrate why you deserved to get the job, but the last thing you need to do is make your new team think you have no respect for their previous achievements.

As Juan Antonio Samaranch used to sort of say at the end of the Olympic Games every time, you're going to help the team build the best council online service ever, but you also need to remember what Isaac Newton said, that if you're going to be seeing further that will be because you are going to stand on the shoulders of giants.

This section of the day is for you to learn about the giants whose shoulders you're about to stand on in your new team. That metaphor needs some work.

Split everybody into groups of three again - different groups from the first exercise. In those small groups each team member will share with the other two what their proudest piece of work from that last year or two was. In this small group discussion the team members should consider why they're proud of it, but also what particular features of the piece of work and how the project to deliver it was conducted enabled such a successful project to come to pass? For each project described, agree what the two most key aspects of the project contributed to its success, and write them down on two separate sticky notes together with the project name.

Spend about half an hour doing this, and then afterwards, go round the room with each person in turn quickly describing their project to the room, and the two aspects of it which were agreed to be key to its success; then put the notes on the wall.

Last reviewed
02-03-2026
Next planned review
02-03-2027