Christine Lloyd spoke at the
Henley Forum for Organisational Learning and Knowledge Strategies recently and when she mentioned what Nokia had done a few years back - my ears pricked up- my emphasis in bold. Enjoy!
Nokia Venturing Organisation was established in 2000 to grow the 'next new business' for Nokia. In addition NVO was also mandated to develop 'new ways of working' for the Finnish Mobile communications company. This gave those working within NVO the space to work in a more entrepreneurial and experimental mode.
NVO set up teams to focus on future global trends and insights as well as exploring new approaches to strategy development, innovation and rapid implementation. New measures were introduced to evaluate the amount of learning extracted from successful and abandoned ventures, as well as measuring the strength of the networks and relationships that new ventures developed.
As part of this, the NVO HR team adopted 'Creating space for conversations' as their HR Strategy. Their approach was to encourage more dialogue and connection around the organisation so that new ideas and opportunities could emerge. It was translated into practical actions such as designing meeting agendas with more space for dialogue, running large scale workshops which brought diverse teams together and facilitating sessions so that all voices could be heard regardless of hierarchy.
NVO soon gained a reputation within Nokia for encouraging diversity and doing things differently. It helped launched a number of new ventures which eventually became independent businesses in their own right.
If only more organizations would take conversation quite as seriously.
