Background
The client
Senior Leader of a Global Biopharma
Services delivered
Insocius catalysis™
Keywords
Strategy, Thinking, Planning
Challenge
A newly formed, geographically dispersed team of 10 pharma leaders faced a challenge familiar to so many leaders today: to get their team’s best thinking on a critical strategic issue, with no budget or bandwidth for travel, a short timeframe to plan and under significant operational pressure to deliver.
The goal was to build both a robust annual plan and team cohesion – virtually. In the mix were team leads, individual contributors, enabling business partners and administrators. And to add extra complexity, half the team were new to the organisation in the last six months, with no time together yet as a team to establish ways of working.
The solution
We built an approach using Nancy Kline’s Time to Think framework. As we discussed in our recent Insocius Insider podcast, Nancy puts forward the idea that the quality of everything we do depends on the quality of our thinking first. And importantly, the quality of thinking depends on the way we treat each other while we are doing that thinking.
With the team’s constraints in mind, we delivered the work through three two-hour virtual sessions across a single week. No travel, no long offsite, just structured thinking time using Nancy Kline’s Thinking Environment model.
We started with appreciation, which one participant noted “gave me the confidence to speak up.” We co-created incisive strategic questions that “challenged our limiting assumptions.” We answered those questions through round-the-table input, which gave everyone a turn to speak with attention and without interruption. “By the third time going round the room, unexpected insights emerged.”
But it wasn’t just about the content of the sessions themselves. Between sessions, we created deliberate pauses for reflection. “Walking and thinking alone helped us avoid knee-jerk plans.” And for big questions, we used timed talk to answer them and focus our action planning, which “stopped wheel-spinning discussion”.
The results
We created one, strategic plan with deep, shared thinking (not rushed consensus) and shared ownership for implementation.
Every voice was heard, and the team developed greater confidence and cohesion.
The overall result was clarity, commitment, team appreciation and good intent.
Delivering impact with agility and pace
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