Huddle case study

MELBOURNE CONVENTION AND EXHIBITION CENTRE

Building a meaningful and realistic strategy for the future

Developing a customer-centric five year strategy for the Melbourne Convention & Exhibition Centre (MCEC).

Desired outcomes

New Value Creation

KEY FACTS

MCEC needed to develop a collective strategy for the next one, three & five years.
Their focus was on increasing customer-centricity throughout the organisation.
Huddle designed and co-facilitated a three-day retreat.
A clear strategy was developed using the The Huddle Thinking Framework.
Connecting the strategy to their purpose ensured organisational wide ownership, input and transparency.

Tools used

Huddle Thinking Framework: This tool gives a holistic approach to project and strategic planning. It helps to align stakeholders at the outset and provides an ongoing reference point for intention and direction.

Brief

Huddle assisted the MCEC and their Executive Leadership Team (ELT) to develop a meaningful and realistic strategy for MCEC’s future.

Their purpose is to connect people through memorable experiences. MCEC is Australia’s most renowned events destination, hosting over 1,000 events each year and contributing almost $1 billion dollars in economic impact to the State of Victoria.

MCEC's journey to focus on customer-centricity and community engagement brought them to Huddle. We were engaged to lead a three-day workshop retreat for the ELT to develop a new strategic plan for the next one, three and five years.

Each Executive’s individual teams had already done great work around their departments’ strategies, so an opportunity arose to strengthen those by developing a collective strategy. One which was meaningful and realistic and most importantly broke down silos between teams. This unified approach gave the ELT scope to focus on MCECs overall purpose, intention and to be true to the needs of the people they serve.

Approach

Huddle held conversations with members of the ELT to understand more about the team, how they communicate, what they had previously done, visions for the future and their understanding of strategy.

From this initial research, we designed a three-day workshop retreat. We leveraged our ‘Huddle Thinking Framework’ to support this workshop. The framework helps people understand when we are approaching things strategically versus tactically. It focuses on:

Purpose (what are we doing and why?)

Outcomes (why are we doing it and when?)

Approach (what are we doing and how?) and

Plan (how are we doing it and when?)

This approach enabled the ELT to be deliberate in their approach. They developed eight areas of strategic priority including tactical steps that had been thoroughly considered via interaction with the Thinking Framework. Each area of strategic priority was ultimately rooted in who they are in service of; their people, customers and community.

Outcome

The retreat created focus and momentum for the ELT.
It led to the design of a series of smaller collaborative workshops, co-facilitated by Huddle and the ELT, that brought in the next level of leadership to critique and co-create the strategy. This also ensured organisational wide ownership, input and transparency. With the conclusion of the strategic planning, Huddle helped create artefacts capturing the eight strategic priorities in a compelling story for the wider MCEC team.