How do you introduce agility in a company in an approachable way?

Let the team experience it rather than explaining it, for example through team building, and integrate it into key moments such as a culture seminar. A simple, jargon-free name helps reduce initial resistance.

What is team building within a culture seminar for?

It turns the seminar’s concepts into practical experience. Teams live what is being talked about, which makes it easier to understand, remember and connect with the company’s strategy.

ImberaCase study

Imbera Making Cool Things: team building to drive agility

Imbera wanted to drive agility, align it with its business strategy and make it approachable for employees. Making Cool Things used the culture seminar to introduce it through team building.

ClientImbera
FormatTeam building

The challenge

The challenge was to drive agility in the company, align it with the business strategy and make it feel approachable for employees. Three objectives that, together, pull in different directions: strategy demands rigour, approachability demands simplicity.

“Agility” is one of those words worn thin by overuse in presentations. Many teams associate it with jargon, methodologies with English names and new meetings in the diary. Presented as theory, it creates distance. Presented as a game with no link to the business, it stays an anecdote. The usual challenge with this kind of initiative is finding the middle ground: letting the team experience what working in an agile way means, enjoy it and understand why it matters to the company.

The idea

The proposal was to use the company’s culture seminar to introduce agility through team building. Instead of creating a new event, it used a moment that already brought the organisation together around its culture.

The decision works for two reasons. First, it brings agility into the conversation about culture, so it does not appear as an isolated fad but as part of who the company wants to be. Second, team building lets people live agility rather than hear about it: teams experience first-hand what it means to collaborate, iterate and solve problems together. The name, Making Cool Things, puts the focus on making things and enjoying it, far from the tone of a manual. The work covered the creative concept, the artwork and an agile-focused team building dynamic.

What we did

Creative concept Making Cool Things
Initiative integrated into the company’s culture seminar
Artwork
Agile-focused team building

Key takeaways (expert view)

If you want your team to adopt a new way of working, let them try it at a moment that already matters, and do not call it jargon.

Use a moment that already exists

Creating a new event for every initiative clogs up the diary. Introducing agility within the culture seminar uses attention that is already gathered and connects the subject to something bigger. It is practical advice for any brand and for event agencies: sometimes the best platform is the one the client already has in the calendar.

Agility is learnt by doing

Explaining agile with slides usually creates more distance than adoption. Team building lets people experience collaboration and iteration first-hand. When a way of working is practical, the communication format should be too. That applies to internal training and also to product presentations at industry events.

A name that takes the solemnity out

Making Cool Things talks about doing and enjoying, not methodology. The tone of the name lowers the resistance jargon triggers and makes it clear the initiative is about results. Choosing the name of an internal initiative well is a strategic decision: it is the first thing the team judges and the thing repeated most.

Services involved

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