A leading global beverage company looked to North Highland for support driving an organizational transformation designed to fuel the next chapter of its growth. With a partnership grounded in co-creation, North Highland guided the company in infusing design thinking into its change initiatives, engaging leaders and associates, and embedding new ways of working into the company culture.
Client Situation
A leading global beverage company had undergone several major organizational changes as part of a transformation journey toward sustainable growth. It overhauled management reporting, accountability, processes, and structure to better align its culture with the new realities of the business. To be successful, it needed employees at all levels to understand, internalize, and adapt to the changes.
Given past organizational change experiences, leaders of the company’s business transformation initiatives knew they needed a new change approach and they reached out to North Highland for help designing new processes, instilling new ways of working into the company culture, maximizing employee engagement, and creating a smooth path for restructuring.
Our Approach
The strategy involved two main areas of the global beverage company’s business: end-to-end marketing and innovation. North Highland focused on the people impacted by the change and what it meant for them; on co-creating with those experiencing the change; and on designing an experience journey able to engage hearts and minds to capture buy-in and sustain the change.
North Highland employed immersive design-thinking techniques, including hands-on design sessions, inspirational videos, and empathy mapping. Senior leaders experienced the change first before cascading it to other levels of the organization, creating strong advocates for the new ways of working. These strategies helped align leadership and associates and gave North Highland a deep understanding of the workforce experiencing the transformation. North Highland was an active partner throughout, guiding the emotional engagement that is critical to buy-in and ongoing change alignment.
Value Delivered
Our approach of co-creation embedded new problem-solving capability within the organization, helping the marketing and innovation teams shift their mindset to one of continuous evolution and improvement. Rather than being told the end goal, the teams were engaged and excited about developing new ways of working and a culture of change. Ultimately impacting 100 executives and over 60,000 employees, our work helped to solidify a critical success factor for transformation: the ability of leadership and associates to understand, internalize, and adapt to changes. The partnership boosted internal muscle for transformation at scale—taking the organization one step closer to achieving its ultimate vision of achieving sustainable growth.
