When the Church Council decided that a shared strategy would be created for all 19 parishes of Helsinki, the schedule was tight and the engagement goal high. In about half a year, they wanted to engage both elected officials and employees in the work, which meant that as many as 1,400 people were involved in the process.
"The challenge was how to engage people in a fairly fast-paced strategy process in such a way that the strategy could reach all the way to the heart and influence the work of every one of us", says Eeva Salonen, Leading Specialist in development work at the Helsinki Parish Union, describing the process.
Dialogue at the centre of strategy work
The Council placed particularly strong emphasis on the importance of dialogue in strategy work. Eeva says that as a development specialist she has a good understanding of, and experience with, the existing engagement tools. Even so, finding a tool that would inspire and interest all the elected officials and employees of Finland's largest parish economy was not straightforward."I thought a lot about what kind of way of working would make people feel that this concerns them specifically, and get them excited about taking a stand on the issues"Because dialogical engagement was precisely what mattered, Topaasia was chosen as the tool. "Dialogue is written into the main things we are doing. We are creating a strategy that is in dialogue with the strategy of the whole Evangelical Lutheran Church of Finland, so it cuts through all levels from the local to the national strategy."
Trusting an engaging process pays off
Eeva says it was also noteworthy that the process involved perfectly ordinary people, employees and elected officials. It was important that they could get to discuss in a way that, in addition to a sense of involvement, produces real results that people can influence."Using Topaasia as a tool was a truly concrete way of putting dialogue into practice, which made the word genuinely come alive in this community. That is an enormous benefit."Eeva says she trusts the process: even if you do not necessarily know at the start what will come out, if you run the process well, good things come out. "Using Topaasia has definitely supported good things coming out of our strategy process. When there has been a genuine desire to hear, understand and enable conversation, it has made the strategy more our own", Eeva reflects.
A strategy of your own through customisation
Making a strategy of their own began right from the start. "We used the game already when the strategy was still being planned. Together with a Topaasia specialist we produced our own card deck, which we could still modify internally." Eeva gives a concrete example of the customisation: "When a certain parish had its own strategy process under way, this made it possible for us to shape for them a way of working that was a little more their own, but on shared foundations.""This really was a win-win thing for us."What Eeva found particularly useful in creating their own strategy deck was that the questions devised for the deck, based on the operating environment analysis and other strategy material, could be used at other times too, not only during the games. "This really was a win-win thing for us", she says. For those making their own deck, Eeva's tip is that good source materials and a specialist's support on how the deck should be built are important. In addition, she recommends testing with real people, those who do not yet know the subject. Indeed, they brought the game into their everyday work. "We made use of perfectly ordinary moments, for example team meetings, where the game could be run." From these moments they learned a lot about what gets people talking and what puzzles them, and the process could be improved continuously. "We had tight schedules, but we made it comfortably because the process was well planned."
The benefits of a digital design game
What appealed to Eeva in the tool was its connection to service design, in which she herself has a background. "For me, Topaasia is a design game", she states. By a design game Eeva means that there is a structured way of doing something within a certain time, and specifically using game-like means. "It brings people into a world that has certain rules of play, where there are not so many hierarchies, and where work is done purposefully in a structured environment". The agility of the game and the fact that it is a digital game also made the work easier. Content is recorded directly on the platform, and results are easy to examine through the analysis tool."In the Topaasia game, things are recorded directly, and moreover in the way they were experienced in that particular situation and moment.""Typically design games are board games, where reporting the results very often involves assigning responsibilities to individuals. That is, someone has to remember to video, write things down and take them forward. The Topaasia game is a method where things are recorded directly, and moreover in the way they were experienced in that particular situation and moment. Through the analysis tool you could also conveniently extract information from a large mass like this", Eeva praises.
The opportunity to engage the personnel as facilitators
Eeva says she trusted her truly skilled personnel. They trained a large group of people, mainly team line managers, to run games. "Playing did not require that only a few people go around running games; I could trust that the platform is so simple and that we have such good group leaders that things would work even though it was a new digital platform. This possibility sets Topaasia apart from other methods."Further, faster, without compromising on listening
At the time of the interview, the world looked such that the strategy work was already on the home straight. "In my view we are much further along with Topaasia's help than we would have been without it, especially in terms of engagement. Because we had a very tight schedule and a lot of people, the support the games provided for the conversations held in teams and across the organisation was absolutely essential to our success", Eeva sums up.
Eeva Salonen
Read more about strategy work with Topaasia Would you like to use Topaasia in your own strategy process? Book a Topaasia demo Also take a look at the downloadable Strategy Engagement Guide."Using Topaasia as a tool was a truly concrete way of putting dialogue into practice, which made the word genuinely come alive in this community. That is an enormous benefit." – Eeva Salonen