How did a leading conservation organization reimagine their planning process so it directly supports and drives their strategic vision?
Client:
Monterey Bay Aquarium
What We Did:
With a new vision for the future of their organization, the leadership team at the Monterey Bay Aquarium needed to reimagine their traditional approach to annual planning. The Future Work Design team designed and facilitated a collaborative workshop to envision an innovative and more productive approach to planning. Together, we co-developed what their future process could look like, as well as built one-of-a-kind tools, templates, and guidelines to bring it to life.
Planning transformed from departmental to cross-functional and highly collaborative. Together we piloted and tested our new process, with Future Work Design leading the facilitation and change management over a one-year planning cycle. With key learnings identified we were then able to iterate and finalize the process based on varying needs of different departments. In the second year, we were able to step back into a coaching role where we focused on building capacity for our client partner to successfully run and manage the process autonomously moving forward. This engagement resulted in a collaborative annual planning process driven by a visual process map, playbook, digital tool adoption, and two annual plans.
“Our annual planning process had gotten really long, convoluted and disconnected from our strategic plan. The FWD team helped us create a process that cut our planning season in half while focusing us on what really matters. Now we spend less time planning and more time working toward our mission.”
– Cynthia Vernon, Chief Operating Officer, Monterey Bay Aquarium
How did a fast-growing digital agency engage their leadership team in aligning career planning, compensation, and professional development with the company values?
Client:
Mad Fish Digital
What We Did:
Strong core values are at the core of Mad Fish but the team recognized that aspects of their employee experience were not aligned with their beliefs. They asked Future Work Design to evaluate their current job descriptions, structure, and professional development programs and design a two-day co-creation workshop to build the employee experience of the future.
Together, we designed a future system that connected their employees’ career pathways with their values and fostered equitable career growth. Throughout the work, the leadership team gained a clear understanding of their compensation philosophy and developed a clear narrative around what career growth looks like for their unique business. With an activation plan in hand, the Mad Fish team left with tactical next steps on how to update their systems and programs with their employees in mind.
“As a values-driven B-corp agency, we were in search of a revitalized company structure that supported our culture and values that could scale to align with our long-term growth goals. The Future Work Design team delivered just that; they asked tough questions, facilitated meaningful and important conversations, and ultimately helped us walk out with an actionable, clear plan to implement. We couldn’t be happier with the outcome and are proud to provide our employees with clearly defined paths to grow their careers.”
— Marcella Wentz, VP of Operations
How might a 100+ year old healthcare company turn “customer obsession” from a slogan into a consistent, embedded way of working?
Client:
Cambia Health Solutions
What We Did:
One of Portland’s leading healthcare organizations, Cambia, approached FWD to help their staff align around a clear and customer-focused way of working. They wanted to define a simple and unified framework that could succinctly bring together their human-centered design approach, lean process improvement methods, and healthcare-specific methodologies in their day-to-day practice.
To begin, we worked closely with their team to deeply understand their customers through key insights from 5+ years of consumer research and market trends. We helped the Cambia team internalize the research, and document it in a compelling set of stories, tools, and frameworks that could be leveraged in their products, services, and experiences. This included a State of the Consumer Book and a Solve for the Consumer Toolkit which we prototyped, tested, and validated with multiple internal groups across the organization. In the end, the team was equipped with tools that guided, inspired, and engaged their staff and showed them clearly how to apply customer centricity to their unique roles.
“Our organization talked about and believed in human-centered design, but bringing that into practice is a much harder task. Everyone had their own set of tools, consumer data and varying methodologies. Future Work Design helped us align our philosophy and unify our approach so we could focus on what matters–innovating healthcare.”
— Meg Dryer, VP User Experience Design
How might a large, siloed, bureaucratic government agency use equity as the lens to transform into an innovative, agile, and collaborative organization?
Client:
Oregon Department of Education
What We Did:
The Oregon Department of Education wanted to establish new ways of working throughout the organization that were centered around equity. They brought in Future Work Design to help them develop a coordinated set of agency wide, and office specific equity strategic plans. To discover meaningful opportunities for new practices across the organization, we brought together their teams for workshops and team coaching. Throughout the process of developing the equity strategic plans, employees practiced new ways of working, including framing their work through an equity lens and using a reflective and collaborative protocol to provide feedback on one another’s work.
Future Work Designed synthesized key insights and learnings from the collaborative work with each office to develop an agency-wide strategic plan, and aligned office specific plans. These plans provided clear strategies and work plans in the areas of internal capacity for innovation and organizational process improvement through an equity lens, as well as improved capacity for meaningful and equitable external partnerships.
“The FWD team was an invaluable partner for the Oregon Department of Education. The equity strategic plans they helped our team develop will guide our work to do what matters, which is to bring equitable education opportunities to all of our kiddos across the state of Oregon.”
— Carmen Urbina, Deputy Director
How does a national non-profit organization authentically center all of their policies and practices around equity and inclusion?
Client:
GLSEN
What We Did:
GLSEN has been championing LGBTQ issues in K-12 education since 1990 and believes that every student has the right to a safe, supportive, and LGBTQ-inclusive education. FWD partnered with GLSEN to examine which existing systems and policies presented barriers that inhibited employee development and which could be amplified to further improve the employee experience. FWD’s internal assessments helped GLSEN prioritize an organizational restructure which mirrored GLSEN’s objective in prioritizing diversity, equity and inclusion. With guidance and support from FWD, GLSEN executed difficult yet necessary internal changes to both its organizational structure and compensation/performance systems to position itself for continued success in serving its constituency.
The partnership between GLSEN and FWD resulted in the strategic hiring of a key resource to support internal changes, reforms to the compensation and performance management system, a communications plan for employees to be aware of internal changes and activities, a full policy audit and recommendations.
“I’ve been lucky to work with and learn from Future Work Design over the last few months. Me and my organization are better for the experience.”
—Eliza Byard, Executive Director
