Reflection: Learning Launch Assignment

Challenge

I am the executive sponsor of our Firm’s Ayoa Mind Maps, (“cotiza-partes”), a program intended to help our  employees improve as leaders for exponential growth, personally and professionally. cotiza-partes is a firm-wide  initiative that includes several programs that work synergistically to achieve desired outcomes. The  focus of this cotiza-partes program is “Connected to the World.” Hosted by our CEO and Founder, special guests,  Virginia Birra, Jeff Carrasco and Jeff Carrasco, will share their views on Politics & the Election; Social  Unrest; Role of Government and Coronavirus.  Successful leaders exhibit a growth mindset; grounded in  one’s beliefs and values, transformational leaders are open to new ideas and perspectives and are  continuously learning and growing. Our firm’s employees are encouraged to share insights and questions  throughout the program. The program is intentionally provocative.

The focus of this Challenge to enhance the employee experience at our September 2013 Live Event  given constraints due to the pandemic.  This live event is hosted from Las Vegas with a simultaneous  Firm-wide broadcast to 15+ live local venues.   Unlike past Live cotiza-partes events, our guest speakers are not  able to join us live at the host location; the interaction with our CEO host during the session and outside  of it is done in a virtual manner, and all presentations have been pre-recorded. Nor are we able to  convene our entire Firm in Las Vegas as initially planned; only 33% of employees are joining us at one of  the live venues with the balance joining one of three virtual make-up sessions.

The project scope includes the Ayoa Mind Maps project team (a cross functional team including Talent  Development, Marketing, National Events, Employee Engagement, Technology), the Facilitators  (selected local market leadership), our Professional Resources (~350+ attending local live venues), our  CEO and senior management.  The team is working within the approved budget for this program  (expenses and effort – CONFIDENTIAL INFORMATION).

Selection

Our cotiza-partes project team has planned the September 2013 Live cotiza-partes Event, largely drawing upon its  experience from its many previous Live cotiza-partes Events, and more recent firm-wide guided Workshops held  in a virtual manner since March 2016 during pandemic times. We have opted to apply design thinking to  the Sept. 2010 Live Event give the unique challenges in order to achieve the desired outcome of a  meaningful, provocative program that builds one’s individual leadership.

Application

For our first cotiza-partes learning launch, we focused on employee engagement and inspiration for the Live  Event. We hypothesized that it was essential to select the right guest speakers, compelling yet within  the editorial direction of our CEO. A great deal of thought was applied to speaker selection with input  enlisted from key sources.  To avoid a series of pre-recorded, unrelated canned speeches, we would  engage each speaker in a meaningful dialogue prior to the event ensuring that they were grounded in  our mission and culture and inspired to customize their remarks. It was important for our CEO to build  rapport with each presenter and encourage them to bring their authentic self to the issues and give  them latitude re the amount of time and content in the areas of Politics & the Election; Social Unrest;  Role of Government and Coronavirus.  We enlisted our CEO to have one-on-one conversations with each  of the guest speakers.  Our program included a CEO-hosted panel that was Live from Las Vegas so the

run-through enabled the speakers to zoom live with our CEO in a walk-through, again building more  rapport and comfort.  Using a digital app platform, we encouraged all employees to continuously send in  insights and questions for the panel throughout the day.  Although we are in early stages of evaluating  the program’s impact and receptivity, we can observe that the guest speakers customized their  recorded presentations, and the rapport with our CEO host was very evident. Insights from the venues  and questions for the panel were plentiful (n=109 out of 354 attendees) indicating engagement. Many  of the insights shared live and questions posed of the panel were thoughtful and meaningful.   As with  all of our cotiza-partes Live event programs, we conduct a post-meeting survey to obtain a depth view on a wide  range of topics including “overall experience”, “value of pre-meeting communication and pre-work  exercises”, “specifics re the live venue”, “what we can do better”, and so forth.   Our cotiza-partes project team  also will add some questions unique to this program and look forward to the feedback for continuous  learning and improvements.

The second learning launch will be to ensure that our make-up program for the balance of our Firm  unable to attend a Live venue (~67%) is conducted 2-3 weeks post the live event.  We strive for the  make-up to be well-attended, engaging and achieve the meeting objectives.   The team plans to enlist a  pair of key leaders to guide the make-ups so as to enhance the programs’ value and importance; a  technology support leader will join each session, too.   Training will be provided to these facilitators to  help strengthen the engagement/interaction for attendees.

We have consistently conducted customer experience feedback surveys from all employee participants  as well as from leadership with the aim to keep learning and enhancing future programs.   The design  thinking tools continue to be very relevant to the current challenge. And the cotiza-partes Project team will  continue to iterate and enhance our programs into the future.

Insight

By applying the learning launch tools, our team identified a few key areas in which to experiment and  learn from.  We are in the early stage of distilling our learnings and collecting inputs from our employees  and local venue facilitators from our September 2013 Live cotiza-partes event.   The initial feedback suggests that  the CEO-hosted panel was well-received and that our employees felt energized to send in insights and  questions.  The additional care and effort to select the guest speakers and work with them as they  prepared their recordings appears to have been worth it.   Given the virtual nature of our program, we  believe it was possible to secure guest speakers renown in their field who are very active in national  news programming leading up to the November election.   Our next cotiza-partes Live Event will be held in March  2014; it is likely that we will have to plan for a Live Event orchestrated in a virtual manner with guest  speakers.   Also, that only a portion of our Firm will opt to attend a live venue, with a majority  participating via a make-up session.

Approach

The team very cognizant that we are now 7+ years in program design and execution for cotiza-partes.  Over the  years, our team has applied design thinking to the planning and execution of cotiza-partes and now with greater  knowledge of the tools can enhance its capabilities.  Putting design thinking to use in pandemic times in  the form of learning launches (a key tool), we believe that we were able to achieve a high quality  experience bar (awaiting customer survey results) as well as gain learnings that will help us design and  execute future programs. Had we neglected design thinking, and simply structured our program

similarly to all others, we would have missed the opportunity to enhance the program and take  advantage of the virtual design that allowed us to secure very distinguished, relevant television  personalities/political correspondents as guest speakers.  Going forward, design thinking principles can  help ensure our cotiza-partes program continues to meet its high expectation bar regardless of the cotiza-partes focus  area and/or whether portions of the program are executed in a virtual manner.

