Improving awareness and getting buy-in for change
In 2011 Philips launched Accelerate! – a change and performance improvement program. The aim of Accelerate! is to create an agile and entrepreneurial Philips. One of the work streams in this program is looking into optimizing and standardizing the idea to market process – everything you need to do to turn an idea into something you can sell.

To kick-off this work stream, 250 key players from within Philips gathered at an event named the Philips Innovation Drive at the Evoluon in Eindhoven to get insights, inspiration and enthusiasm to personally drive the transformation across the organization. As they were still hiring a communications lead, I joined the core team to drive communications, just a couple of weeks before the start of the event.

Communications plan
I quickly pulled together a communications plan inspired by Kotter’s change model, focusing on:
1. Establishing a sense of urgency: Informing all participants on the expectations and logistics of the event and setting the scene to create a sense of urgency with the invitees.
2. Creating a guiding coalition: Setting the framework of the program to create a basic understanding of the work stream, and establish a group feeling.
3. Develop a clear shared vision: Activating the audience during the event to participate in the discussions, capture their feedback, and feed that into the work stream.
4. Communicating the vision: Creating the tools for the participants to cascade the information in their organizations

This plan included:
– Event app: this app guided the audience through the event and helped the participants to be prepared for the event. As there were several sessions running in parallel, it helped the audience to know where to go. It was also used as an interactive feedback mechanism, with short polls.
– Gameshow format: developed a gameshow format with the key leaders of the work stream. In several rounds, they needed to explain what their work stream was all about, using props, pitches, battles and more. This helped the audience to quickly create a basic understanding of the work stream.
– Visions of the future: identified three speakers and worked with them to create three visionary talks to inspire the audience on how the future could look like, and what the opportunities are that we can capture if we change some way or working.
– Collaboration tool: Developed an online collaboration tool to collect suggestions, ideas, challenges after each session. This included a big visualization of all comments so participants could see their contributions grow over the course of the event.
– Deployment toolkit with communications materials: Created a full deployment toolkit for all participants, including instructions, presentations, edited movies of all sessions and short summaries, and other communications materials.

Results:
– Communications & information scored 4,1 out of 5.
– Collaboration tool resulted in 675 comments, suggestions and ideas for deployment from the participants. This input was used to further shape the deployment of the program.
– Participants used the deployment materials to cascade to over 2000 employees.
– Event clarified and accelerated the creation of a vision needed for the further roll out of the work stream, and kick-started a group of change ambassadors in the organization.
– Communications plan formed the basis for communications plan the new communications manager hired that was hired 5 weeks after the event.