Launching a new process across a large multi-disciplinary community
With a focus on oncology and rare diseases, the U.S. Medical team of an international pharmaceutical company had designed a new strategic planning process. To kick off the change initiative, learning and development contracted Do Tank in 2022 to begin the journey of immersing their teams in the mechanics and value proposition (there is always an art to the culture and behavior change with things like this) of the new approach.
The challenge boiled down to how we might create experiences for a sophisticated community of highly credentialed people in a highly regulated pharmaceutical space that helps them work together more effectively and create better strategic plans?
All the technical pieces had already been created; everyone had access to the process definitions, organizational chart, and information needed to follow a new process for strategic planning. However, the seven different roles that contribute to strategy (operations, advertising, evidence generation, etc.) were historically siloed and unaware of their colleagues’ contributions. We needed to engage hundreds of geographically dispersed people in an effort to implement a big change in how therapies are deployed and nurtured in different markets.
Two large in-person events were key moments in the employee journey; these were tied together with a digital hub that centralized process documentation, event outputs, and digital conversation. The main goal was to create a journey for the community; we didn’t want to dump a new process document on them and then tell them to ‘do it.’
In the first gathering, we addressed the pain point of an almost entirely remote department that felt disconnected. Some key elements of this experience included:
Moving from ‘simulation to reality’ a few months later, operational teams (immunology, rare disease, gastrointestinal, neuroscience) then convened to work with a custom set of design tools on their current challenges. The new medical planning process has very broad application, from clinical trials to marketing. Examples of prompts that we posed to teams included:
The whole journey was a blend of in-person and virtual experiences, with a high degree of attention to engagement and capability data to understand how people were interacting with the new planning process.
The in-person gatherings were great, but they were only a key moments in a much broader journey (80% of which was remote). The goal was to link together multiple interactions to gradually cultivate a deeper understanding of the new process and greater collaboration. Winning the hearts and minds of people – who can be difficult to persuade – requires nuance and appealing to multiple different motivations.
Through a blend of in-person events, gamification (the use of memory games to instill key concepts), remote workshops, educational content, and digital workspaces, we successfully launched the medical planning process. It is now the standard approach for all strategy design in U.S. Medical.
To supplement the new process, we built a custom set of visual design tools to help teams explore their market context, identify tactics they want to pursue and design how they will achieve their goals. These tools were launched in 2023 and continue to be key resources for planning cycles.
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