Earlier this month, BCC held a boot camp at Massey University in Palmerston North for their External Relations Department. Staff from the Wellington and Auckland campuses as well as from Manawatu attended.
Assistant Vice-Chancellor for External Relations and Development Penelope Bar-Sellers and her team enlisted the help of BCC to run a day and half event for staff members to troubleshoot some problems/opportunities they had already identified in an innovative and effective way, as an alternative to more traditional approaches such as senior staff member meetings.
Dave Craig, Roger McEwan and Nick Gain from BCC designed a programme for the external relations team, borrowing some of the methods BCC use to run Startup Weekend and Innovate to accelerate problem solving, and teach some valuable skills.
After running through some MBA style workshops and being introduced to the social lean canvas, the teams worked on clarifying the main problems that the staff wanted to address. The different groups started breaking down each issue on the social lean canvas and formulating ways of implementing improvements in both their own workplaces and Massey-wide. Each team presented a five minute pitch to the group which was ranked by everyone else based on their innovativeness, pitching prowess and use of the social canvas.
To wrap it all up, working groups were formed to implement the most creative and practical ideas and continue development on the solutions. “We have extensive experience in early stage start-up practices and have found a way to successfully implement some of these procedures to get groups to work together in a new and effective ways,” says Dave Craig. “Team work is critical not only with start-ups but SMEs and big corporates like Massey. Our boot camp pushed everyone’s comfort levels and the final result was outstanding.”
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