330 top managers gathered for a new strategy launch. The objective: aligned direction, shared excitement and buy-in across the management team. The bold move: turning it into an immersive board game!
Orkla Foods Norway had been through a period of restructuring in the preceding months, causing disruptions which put pressure on the shared sense of direction and cohesion.
The objective of The Orkla Foods Norway Strategy Kickoff was to bring the managers together to address challenges both externally and internally: externally to maximize the potential offered by the restructuring, seizing market opportunities, and internally to reforge unity in the teams, to realign everyone on the new strategy , to create enthusiasm and excitement for the way forward and to inspire buy-in with every team member, across all 330 managers. Brand and product owners and their teams would have to understand and embrace their roles, plans, the goals and tactics set for the new year. And not least, the event was to give managers implementation tools to also inspire their own teams after the event. A key measure of success would be to which degree the strategy was embraced throughout the organization.
The creative power of this project derives from its playful, precise and clever adaptation of a familiar idea to an unexpected and new context. To involve the audience in the strategy presentations – normally given as PPTs on a large screen – Orkla Foods Norway developed a custom board game. The gameplay, rules, tokens and board design was all based on real dynamics of the Norwegian food market, appropriately represented in the game’s name “The game of the Norwegian Food Market”. But why a board game? The Kickoff event took place close to February break in Norway, a time when many families, true to tradition, vacation in their winter cabins. Shopping for a cabin weekend with the family is a Friday ritual in Norway, and many of ORKLAs products aim for that shopping cart. When ORKLA invited its top 330 managers to launch a new strategy for 2024, the entire event was created as a mountain cabin experience.
