COVID Drives Virtual Collaboration
Profile
Industry: Financial Services & Technology - cross industry
Customer in focus: Small businesses impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic
Change topic: Improving financial resilience
Engagement: 3 weeks engaging 3 changeUp|GLOBAL partners designing and facilitating a virtual workshop consisting of 8 90-minute virtual sessions
Location: Virtual, engaging participants across 7 time zones
Challenge
The global COVID-19 pandemic - arguably the most compelling problem of our times resulting in sudden and massive loss of life, loss of financial income, loss of personal freedom and loss of support.
A group of passionate leaders in the the banking and technology sectors want to volunteer their collective expertise and resources to improve the financial resilience of people and businesses impacted by the pandemic. The secondary challenge - everyone is now working remotely with unfamiliar tools and, given the 'distanced' situation, getting a clear understanding of how individuals and businesses are bearing up is difficult.
Approach
changeUp|GLOBAL partnered with banking technology leader, Temenos, to bring together banking leaders from North America and Europe, all eager to leverage their respective knowledge and resources to explore how they might help those struggling with financial resilience.
changeUp|GLOBAL designed, coordinated and facilitated a virtual workshop as follows:
- The Re:Solve™ framework was applied as the methodology to move volunteers through a series of 8 virtual 90-minute sessions
- A 'learn by doing' approach was taken enabling participants to quickly become adept with virtual collaboration tools (Zoom and Mural).
- Two virtual teams were formed focusing on the situation in North America and Europe respectively.
- Interviews were coordinated with individuals and small business owners, spanning 12 industries, to provide participants with direct insight into hardships being faced.
- Teams defined problem spaces focusing on the plight of small businesses, generated solution ideas, and then each team selected one viable idea and developed a conceptual prototype.
Deliverables
Succeeded in bringing together 25 banking, design and technology experts, representing various firms, across 7 time zones, to virtually collaborate and generate over 150 solution ideas, culminating in 2 prototyped solution concepts.
"The global collaboration was amazing! I wish my company had a mechanism to
run design thinking collaboration sessions just like this was done."
Banking executive & workshop participant
Impact
- Discovery: A strong similarity in challenges faced by small businesses both In Europe and in North America was confirmed.
- Product innovation: Both teams developed solutions that could easily be adapted to existing platforms.
- Process innovation: Successfully demonstrated the feasibility of a virtual, gorilla approach to problem solving within a corporate setting.
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