A Unique Learning Experience!
The Challenge draws on processes such as Design Thinking to take a group of cross-functional teams through an immersive, experiential learning process where they tackle a real issue in a safe environment.
Participants are given the freedom to experiment, collaborate, challenge and solve a problem with no negative consequences, and where no ideas are bad ideas. The result is that the participants better understand themselves and one another, are more confident in their ability to solve problems, and ultimately they build relationships across the business which triggers the process of positive cultural change.
A typical 2-Day Challenge structure
Launch
The Day prior to the Challenge we introduce the real business challenge that you have provided. This sets the scene for the participants and establishes ground rules. Here we put the participants into cross-functional teams and introduce the facilitator who will be working with the group for the duration of the Challenge.
Day One
The teams return the next day for an intense series of activities and interventions to support them with their ideation and deliberately push them beyond the constraints of business-as-usual thinking. The nature of the challenge that your business sets will determine, to some extent, some of the content in the programme.
Day Two
The two days culminate in the teams pitching their ideas to a panel of judges. When the teams come to pitch their ideas, this can be to your business’s SLT, or a panel of judges appointed by UC, or a combination of both depending on your preferred option.
Our years of experience has taught us that while workshop and learning content is important, bringing that content to life and applying it is critical to embedding it as behaviour and changing mindsets.
Why do these challenges work?
- Being time constrained, the challenge structure means participants are forced to be innovative and creative with their problem solving.
- Immersing diverse teams in an environment which welcomes creative, ‘outside the box’ thinking and allows participants the freedom to take risks in a safe environment. This builds new relationships from different areas of your business and promotes collaboration across departments.
- Providing a structured programme with lots of check-ins and expert guidance enables participants to produce the best ideas possible.
- In addition, the process brings value to the business as a whole, given an idea, problem or opportunity is explored from a number of perspectives.
