Designing an organisational vision with 100 employees

Ever been to Moldova? Chances are high you haven’t. It’s the least visited country in Europe according to the UN World Tourism Organisation. Moldova is an Eastern European, former Soviet, landlocked country with great wines, great people, few tourists and high development ambitions. The UNDP is present with over 100 people to spur development (in many different ways), and we were asked to help them by uniting their entire team around the vision for their work in Moldova.

As Stefan Liller, head of the Country Office, put it, “you want to run a well-oiled machine and this is only possible when everybody truly shares a common vision. We all get a lot to read: documents, strategies, action plans, while people’s attention span is shorter and shorter. What we need is convincing and appealing images to enable our entire staff to explain what we do, what we stand for and where we want to go.”

During 2.5 days we guided the UNDP staff towards a clear vision for their work. We used a creative design process to turn countless words into a clear, visual story and combined this approach with exercises about communication, action planning and visual thinking to get the entire team on board.

One of the best moments for us was certainly when the Country Director became really enthusiastic about the energy and authority with which every single staff member was pitching the same vision during a story building exercise. So enthusiastic indeed, that he was energetically walking around, carrying a laptop with his Skype open to show UN colleagues what was happening.

Working, and socialising with the UNDP Moldova team was a great experience. We hope to see the envisioned progress in Moldova and to return to see it. We are proud to have often read in the survey, “this has been the best retreat we have ever had.”