LONDON -- We learned that there are many great minds in this business.
Our fourth Internal Communications Forum was held at H&K in London on Wednesday, April 30, 2008. We had people there from GE, BAE, Shell, RBS, Pfizer, DPWN, the Learning & Skills Council, the COI, AstraZeneca and more.
We set these up to be a meeting of mates. And these are all people that we have met and sometimes worked with who have a common curiosity about how the world of change & internal communications can and should work.
This time we asked GE and Rio Tinto to present. They talked about how they manage change and presented two very different, but equally compelling, pictures of what it feels like. And they showed us how they see themselves getting through it.
I also presented on the topic of 'managing employees in a recession' and we had round table discussions about how we can be better at managing change in our organisations.
It was a great event. The feedback was excellent and the conversations afterwards in the H&K bar were decidedly animated. The last-one-standing, and therefore the winner of the promised bottle of champagne, only went home at about 11pm.
In our wash-up this morning we found a few things that we think we'll do differently next time.
- More time for round-tables
- Increase the focus on sharing issues rather than answers
- Make it longer
- Maybe add a meal?
- Put a proposition to the group to test
And I am sure there's more. We'll keep trying to perfect it.
Our next one is tentatively planned for September. We will keep you posted.
/df