FM Global Strategic Plan Workshops

Bringing design to the C-Suite.

TLDR: I helped FM Global run a series of workshops to discuss, organize, and prioritize, their business strategic goals. Working with FM Globals senior leadership and Senior enterprise enablement teams to define exactly what they need to accomplish and watch in the next 3 years. The impact of this work changed the way the leadership plan, and it was a privilege to work on the future of entire company, not just enterprise UX.

Context and Challenge

Bringing design to the C-Suite. FM Global is a property insurance company with more than one-third of Fortune 1000 companies as its partners in mitigating risk. It’s a firm that is guided by the belief that most losses can be prevented. Grounding recommendations in world-class scientific research and on-the-ground engineering services, FM global is surprising innovative for an insurance company.

That modest innovative approach came to a head in 2019.

Designers have never been invited to the FM Global C-suite, Partly because the team didn’t exist two years before the 2019 planning season. FM Global was looking to make big moves in the future and needed to up-skilled its planning habits.

My design lead, Steve Szermer, was tapped by some of the VP’s to help capture each business unit’s enterprise challenges. After three months of rigorous interviews, workshops, and playbacks, word got around that design had this capability to help with planning at the corporate initiative level.

Open

Open

One of the insights that emerged from the work Steve had done was an enterprise perspective on business challenges and goals. These enterprise-level themes crossed old business silos. They gave senior leadership a fantastic resource of what the entire business needed to accomplish, and what their intentions were, rather than the individual siloed perspectives that usually trickled up.

Soon a meeting was put on the calendar to discuss the strategic plan, and a committee of business unit Vice Presidents was selected. I became involved when the workshop needed to be planned, set-up, and run.

I created several workshop modules and detailed their plans, ran through our plan canvas, and captured structured notes from our stakeholders in realtime. I then synthesized the work into graphical representations of themes vs. the interest of the senior business unit managers.

Process

The Strategic plan committee refined last year’s plan after they had discussed each business unit's vision. Their discussion was transcribed and grouped into categories that help represent a stubbed out strategic plan for each business unit to collaborate on and flesh out. 

My design lead and I translated the original Strategic Plan from a Word document into the stickie notes, so we had a 1:1 map to play around with on a large Surface Hub. 

I then mapped each categorization to groupings/clusters that emerged from the original notes that each Business Unit’s senior manager gave. We this recorded as we listened to each unit present their business vision (30-minute) presentations of each business's needs and goals.

Mainly the Strategic Plan committee sorted their comments by nine enterprise themes (knowledge Transfer, Data and Insights, etc.). Later on, as they discussed, design organized according to what they felt was a better label/grouping matching the conversation around the strategic plan.

In one example of the sorting, we took the notes that were tagged in both knowledge transfer and Data to Insights and combined them into a new theme called Data-Driven. We then reviewed with the senior leadership, and they then agreed that this was a significant pillar in the strategic plan.

As the workshop continued, each business unit leader kept refining each of the emerging themes through the filter of how they wanted to push the strategic plan. We made sure that each of the original topics can be traced from their new categorizations, maintaining the link to all the earlier workshops.

Results

While this year, FM Global may have taken a more conservative approach to rethinking their typical strategic plans, they had vital business consultants like us designers in the room to make sure we pushed executives out of their comfort zones.

They were appreciative of this expertise and without talking about the specifics, greatly benefited from having divergent thinking captured and pushed. I was honored to be seen as a trusted advisor during this critical time in FM Globals' history.