When Nick Hawkins was CFO, he wanted his leaders to make a change to enable creativity and innovation throughout the division. Nick requested that a working group of his most trusted executive team be created to focus on creativity and innovation. Each member of this working group were influencers in their own high-profile initiatives of work and wanted to shift the perception of creativity and innovation within the finance division.
The CFO Creative Working Group (CWG) objective was to make the CFO Division more creative to support IAG’s strategic focus on innovation and growth. We were asked by our Executive General Manager of Innovation to help the CFO CWG achieve their goal to drive more creativity and innovation within their division.
When we were engaged to support the CFO CWG, they had already been attempting to solve their problem for 2 months. The first session was understanding and absorbing what had already been delivered. By the end of the session, we highlighted our observation that the CWG is a strong team, however just jumped straight into solution mode. We asked the group several questions which challenged their thinking, in which they agreed with our observations.
We then made the suggestion that we could help them achieve their objectives and that we had recently completed work recently the team could draw upon. They loved this and decided that we should take the lead in the working group.
We decided that the first session to run was to run a proper kickoff session despite the CWG already running their project for two months. To our surprise, they verbally expressed how grateful they were that we ran a proper kickoff. Several members of the team didn't know why they were there and the role they were meant to play. Some members were frustrated that they were taking on more of the work than others. We surfaced topics most had assumed everyone aligned on and it highlighted how misaligned the working group was.
We then went into focusing on the problem and creating a clear achievable HMW statement. We assigned tasks to be completed by each group to keep the momentum going until the next session.
During the following sessions, we took the working group through the insights of our Creative Intelligence program. All of which had aligned to their objectives and we shared our potential solutions. As this was a group of senior leaders, we constantly provided the team with options on how they could move forward as a team in the form of a decision point. This helped the working group feel even more connected to the outcome and work.
The CFO CWG decided that they wanted to be upskilled in Creative Intelligence and wanted to learn more about embedding it in their respective business units. We spent the next several months taking the team through the program.
The design led approach to introduce Creative Intelligence resulted in each CFO CWG member experiencing a shift in perspective of Design and Creativity which they now bring back to their day to day roles. Each CFO CWG member represented a significant part of the CFO division so the impact of these members has had a multiplier effect on the division. These area include:
• Operational Partnering
• Asset Allocation
• Corporate Treasury
• Internal Audit
• Australian Finance
• NZ CFO
• Analysis Integrity & Capital Management• Placement & Underwriting
"I would like to call out the wonderful support provided by Surya, Erich and Sajain to the CFO Creativity Working Group. Their support, expertise and leadership has allowed us to move our project forward on a sound well researched foundation. We have introduced new concepts and processes to our CFO Leadership Team that has helped us reframe problems and research creativity on strong foundations. The team helped us create a plan and vison to embed creativity into CFO. Providing us with tools and information to further our understanding and thinking."
George S – Executive Manager, Operational Partnering IAG