Strategic narrative for an innovation team

A team responsible for scaling internal innovation inside a global pharmaceutical company had a real mandate and no shared story. Its members described the work differently to each other and differently again to the stakeholders whose support it depended on — which for a team whose entire function is influence is a structural problem, not a communications one.

They needed to align internally on their vision, and then take a narrative to global stakeholders and their wider influencing community.

We designed an interactive two-day session and built all the materials for it, providing the research and end-to-end facilitation. The session was structured to produce a narrative rather than a discussion about one — the difference being that people leave with words they have agreed rather than a sense that they broadly concur.

We documented and visualized the resulting narrative, then designed and delivered a second event for the team’s global stakeholders: partly to share the narrative, and partly to gather feedback on it while it could still change.

The team has continued to grow, and now has a powerful working metaphor for developing champions across the company — “Come Get Your Cape” — which came out of the session and outlived it. A metaphor people repeat unprompted is a better test of a narrative than any of the ones normally applied to it.