Strategic Leadership Offsite
Creating a community rather than a conference.
Brief
Bring US and UK leaders together in Buffalo, NY to foster collective ownership and build relationships by focusing on conversations and experiential learning over presentations.
Strategy
We summed this up as ‘Be more Buffalo’. A radical approach that made the most of being in National Grid’s ‘backyard’ to immerse leaders in the customer, community and colleague experience.
Experience
To achieve our strategy, we moved keynotes out of the agenda; delivering them as videos during the pre-comms. This freed time across the three-days for the 120 leaders to get out into the city, working with community groups, meeting customers and spending time with frontline colleagues. These experiences were a springboard for conversational sessions tackling shared challenges.
The focus on relationship building, saw us rejecting typical conference behaviours in favour of a more human approach. This included beginning each day with an informal briefing over breakfast. Social events were a further opportunity to engage people with the spirit and people of Buffalo.
The relationship with local community groups extended right through to the event environment, where the branding and staging was contributed to by National Grid’s charity partners.
Live Union helped us design and deliver a dramatically different experience. Driving behavioural change by emotionally connecting our leaders to life in Buffalo.
