Introducing New Leadership Tools – A Resource for Leaders Working Through Disruption

How the team at Horizons Research updated a resource for leaders

Working with the Horizons team on the rebrand and launch of our VUCA toolkit was a great experience from start to finish. The team are really knowledgeable, each with their own area of expertise to bring to the table, which meant the attention to detail was beyond our expectations. From the start you could tell it was important for the team to understand the essence of our organisation and capture this along with our brief throughout the whole journey. I would thoroughly recommend working with the Horizons team, a highly collaborative and generally lovely team.
Ellie Bevis, Assistant Operations Manager, The Staff College

The Staff College was looking for an update of their VUCA animation. VUCA, a leadership theory of Warren Bennis and Burt Nanus, explores how to deal with the real-life turbulent environment in which decisions often have to be made. It stands for volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity. The updated version needed to show greater diversity and be an attractive tool for The Staff College associates and facilitators.

It’s not easy talking about things going pear-shaped. As a team of researchers, facilitators and communication designers at Horizons, we were keen to design an animation that we would enjoy delivering to an audience. We came up with the concept of VUCA at sea because it gave us great flexibility for exploring and expanding on different environments – and frankly, very nice visuals to work with.

The project was designed with stages that could be discussed with the client and signed off. After our initial kick-off meeting discussing the successful aspects of the old animation and what we would like to change going forward, we designed a script which our clients could review with their associates. Based on their feedback we created a rough storyboard which we then developed and finalised to be the foundation for the illustrations. Before sending the project over to our animator we sourced a friendly and welcoming voice-over artist. Ida, our project manager for VUCA, worked closely with the whole team to get the best out of everyone’s skills.

We also created a microsite where all the resources are collected and shared for ease of distribution, no messy email attachments just a simple link. This also means we can update the resources at any time. Another benefit for the client is we can track the website visitors for reporting purposes. The VUCA animation is hosted on youtube so we can also gain valuable insight from the stats gathered there.