"Jump Start" Workshops

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This effort will get your team offsite, away from day-to-day distractions, to a location that allows for productivity…a "jump start" of your thinking process.

We find that the most successful workshops have specific objectives to accomplish.

For example, a primary objective might be to refine the business strategy for serving Government customers. This could include a broad array of other objectives including, but not limited to, the following:

• Refining the goals and objectives of having a government strategy
• Concluding how to define which "segments" of government customers to focus on
• Assessing potential tactics to further create a sense of integration and partnering between your company and your government customers
• Creating tactics to bolster two-way communication between company touch points and government customers
• Seeking ways to create further accountability and authority among company employees trying to solve their government customers' needs
• Determining which internal processes need a different approach for the government customers and how to go about achieving this flexibility

Sessions such as this typically focus not only at a strategic level, but also at the tactical, nuts and bolts level.

The "Jump Start" Process:

Our role as consultants is to use our broader base of experience to help jump start your thinking process with ideas that have worked in other industries. To do this effectively requires a time-tested process that helps insure the success of this venture.

We recommend starting this process by conducting a two-day off-site workshop with your team at our newly constructed Red Hawk Ranch facility in the Temecula Valley.

NOTE: Meeting participants should include 12 (optimum) to as many as 16-24 team members. Workshops typically start at 8 or 9am and continue until 4 or 5pm. Dress is casual business attire.

Phase 1: Immersion

(Workshop preparation)
In this phase of the process, we're preparing for your workshop by discussing meeting objectives with your team leader and two or three other key individuals within the company (typically to include team mentors or sponsors). The consulting team will be reviewing research findings and team documents that show where your thinking is at the moment. We will ask all team members to respond to a short survey that will help us determine breakout groupings and session stimuli based on innovation styles within the group.

• Focus: In-depth interviews with key people on your team to focus in on manageable objectives for your workshop and develop workshop outlines that insure we meet these objectives.
• Insights: Review the thinking behind the objectives, review position papers, research results, benchmarking results
• Styles: Informal survey of team members to determine what they are bringing to the table. Results from this guide our facilitation style and customize the stimulus used during initial invention workshops

Phase 2: Invention

(1st Day of Workshop)
In phases 2 and 3 of the process, the Red Hawk Ranch team of consultants will facilitate workshop sessions and coach breakout sessions. We will use three consultant coaches for 12-18 participants; four if you bring 19 to 24 team members.

• Out of the Box: Your team of 8 to 16 managers from across departments is guided by the Red Hawk Ranch team of consultants thru a workshop designed to break the ice and open them up to voicing and accepting new ideas. Methods used are based on what we learn from the earlier informal survey of the team.
• Idea Generation: The entire team participates in our system of ideation that ladders from what customers say they need and expect to the basic underlying needs these expectations satisfy. After a short break, we re-address these basic needs by brainstorming what can be done to better meet these needs…a no holds barred workshop where the term, "can't do," is forbidden. Participants have been known to call this the process of "throwing spitballs on the wall to see what sticks."
• Ideas to Paper: After a congenial lunch on the patio, break-out teams are formed to address specific areas of concern and take initial ideas from the wall to paper. Initial ideas are challenged, refined, enhanced and prepared for presentation back to the rest of the team. Each break-out team has a Red Hawk Ranch consultant-coach to assist them in the process.
• Roundtable: The last effort of the day is for each team to present their findings and recommendations back to the full team for initial feedback and facilitated discussion. "Can't do" is still locked out from the vocabulary while team members are encouraged to look for similarities and synergies across approaches.

While your team adjourns for an evening of socializing, the Red Hawk Ranch team gets to work on the ideas from the day. At this stage we are applying our combined years of experience to your team's efforts of the day. Our job is to prepare for the following morning's discussions by grouping ideas into potential solutions; identifying the easy "low hanging fruit", assessing the feasibility of the more difficult solutions, and applying a level of logical honesty by identifying questions and gaps that remain in some potential solutions.

Phase 3: Interaction

(2nd Day of Workshop)
It is this phase of the process that we start focusing back in on the business realities of the Workshop - meeting specific objectives. With our facilitation, we will tear apart the solutions and rebuild them. We will coach breakout teams thru the process of applying tactical behaviors to support an overall strategy, and as we finish the day, we will help your team create a sense of ownership for a carefully crafted strategy that is backed by do-able tactics

• Devil's Advocate Debate: The Red Hawk Ranch consultants present their work from the night before by feeding back what they heard during the Invention Workshops and providing initial feedback to extend initial ideas into action steps. A facilitated discussion with the entire team helps transform the random ideas of the day before into a focused set of fresh and feasible ideas. Rigorous debate refines them into clearly stated goals and actions.
• Refinement: Break-out sessions will take the refined set of ideas back to the drawing board - this time for the reality check of addressing tactical applications. Who, what, where, how and when? Consultant-coach led discussions will refine and prepare to present back to the full team.
• Recap: The last afternoon is oriented toward finalizing the strategy and tactics to go forward with. The Red Hawk Ranch consultants will lead your team thru an active discussion that provides each participant with the tools to discuss and defend decisions made during the workshop. Each of your team members will leave feeling equally capable of educating and exciting others with the discoveries brought out during these sessions.

Phase 4: Incorporating

(Reporting)
We recognize that no matter how useful a workshop is at helping you look at your world in a different way, the path toward actionable use of workshop results can be a rocky one. Ultimately, you want to incorporate decisions made at the workshop into everyday practices and sometimes, into the corporate culture.

We can assist you in this process in three ways:

• Executive Report: We will provide you with an executive summary highlighting key decision points and action items resulting from your team's hard work at the workshop. This summary is intended both as an internal tool for you and your team as well as a management update. This is typically a collaborate deliverable with us presenting you with a draft first so you can make sure any internal "minefields" are handled in a way that you can live with. The objective: a report that will help be a change agent internally for your team.
• Follow-up Coaching: It is our experience that follow-up coaching and facilitating is useful from time to time as a means of assisting you as your team strives to meet critical milestones. This is usually accomplished by a focused group discussion with one of the Red Hawk Ranch consultants facilitating a cross-functional discussion and insuring that meeting objectives are met. Sometimes this is also a mentoring/coaching process to assist account reps on a one-to-one basis as they strive to incorporate new ideas and methods into on-site customer visits.
• Customer Account Revue™: On-going or point-in-time in-depth customer account interviews to determine how your key customers view your efforts. Overall satisfaction with the relationship, what has improved and what could be improved. Interviews follow a semi-structured approach that allows us to dig beyond easy answers in order to get to useful and actionable information.