Project Summary
Client: Internet Solutions: Pan-African Business Leadership Team
Role: Design Lead and Facilitator
Scope: CX Strategy Alignment, Lego® Serious Play Facilitation, Executive Alignment, Leadership Development
Outcome: Connected business-unit strategies into a unified enterprise vision; strengthened collaboration and ownership among leaders
Outcomes & Impact
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Unified Strategic Narrative: Each BU left with a clearly visualised strategy model that connected to the enterprise vision, breaking down years of siloed planning.
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Cultural Cohesion: The process fostered empathy and mutual accountability among executives who had previously worked in isolation.
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Actionable Commitments: Leaders co-authored 30-60-90 day plans for execution and follow-through, monitored by an accountability framework.
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Sustained Engagement: The workshop created language and rituals, “essence,” “secret sauce,” “aligned not right” that continued to shape leadership conversations long after the session.
Vision & Challenge
A leading Pan-African business wanted to reimagine its enterprise strategy from the inside out, ensuring that each Business Unit’s leadership team could not only articulate its strategic priorities, but see itself as part of a single, cohesive organisation.
The executive committee recognised that strategy documents alone were not creating alignment. Different units operated in silos, each with competing priorities, disconnected cultures, and limited collaboration. The brief: design an immersive, human-centred experience that would help leaders co-create, not just comply with, strategy.
I will be honest, this was honestly the first time I participated and facilitated in a Lego Serious play strategy workshop – and I cannot express how much fun, honesty, trust and authenticity it created for the team. I swear by this practice as we got to great outcomes MUCH quicker!
Approach
We designed and facilitated a week-long Real-Time Strategy Workshop in Kenya, bringing together executives from all Business Units for an experience grounded in reflection, creativity, and accountability.
The methodology blended BrandLove’s CX-leadership toolkit with Lego® Serious Play, empathy mapping, and value proposition canvassing using tactile, visual methods to unlock authentic discussion, alignment, and systems thinking.
Our process guided participants through four phases:
Self & Team Awareness – Clarifying personal purpose, leadership style, and blind spots using tools like the RASA Conscious Listening and Drama Triangle frameworks.
Enterprise Identity Mapping – Each BU defined its Core, External, and Aspirational identities, surfacing tensions between perception and reality.
Co-Creation & Alignment – Using Lego Serious Play, executives built 3D models representing their BU strategies, visualising dependencies, challenges, and shared enablers.
Integration & Commitment – The final day merged all BU models into a single connected “enterprise ecosystem,” aligning around common values, growth pillars, and customer promises.
Design in Action
The week was intentionally experiential.
Outdoor empathy walks and reflective listening sessions built trust across silos.
Creative exercises — from marshmallow tower challenges to Lego simulations — reframed traditional strategy work into collaborative storytelling and prototyping.
Each participant articulated their professional purpose, team wish, and leadership commitments using templates from the Real-Time Strategy workbook.
Daily retrospectives captured insight and energy shifts, ensuring reflection translated into tangible next steps.