Crackerjack Visual Thinking

Category: Business Development

  • Does your retail organisation have a clear vision for sales success this Christmas?

    Does your retail organisation have a clear vision for sales success this Christmas?

    Christmas is the month after next – don’t panic!!! Having a clear vision for sales success will help everyone in your organisation know what they need to do achieve your seasonal goals.

    Giving your people clarity about what they need to do at any time of year is important in the retail sector, but even more so when faced with the pressures and demands of the all important Christmas period.

    Whilst you will probably have your sourcing plans in place, ensuring that your manufacturing, supply chain, order fulfilment, support services and customer facing operations are aligned, joined-up and working effectively will remain a key challenge over the next few months.

    This is not only a matter of helping people understand their specific role in your organisation, but also helping them understand how their actions directly and indirectly impact on other people and processes involved upstream and downstream from them in your seasonal operations.

    Illustrating the vision for your organisations Christmas operations via a rich picture can be one of the most effective ways of aligning your people to your plans in the run up to this key trading period. This approach creates a shared understanding of what needs to be done, as well as helping people see how they can best support their colleagues across the organisation in achieving your seasonal trading goals.

    To talk more about creating a clear vision for sales success this Christmas, please call +44 (0)115 6483381 or contact us.

    John

    John Ashton – Founder of Crackerjack Visual Thinking

  • What do all of our clients have in common?

    What do all of our clients have in common?

    Our clients come from a wide variety of sectors and specialisms, yet they all have one thing in common; the desire to engage people with their work in as impactful, memorable, informative and visual way as possible.

    Helping people easily and clearly see the value and benefit of an organisation and its work (via rich pictures, graphic recording or whiteboard animation) serves a number of purposes:

    • For team members: ENGAGEMENT AND MOTIVATION. It helps them understand how the work they do day in and day out contributes to the organisations goals.
    • For leaders in the organisation: STRATEGY AND DIRECTION. It helps them to consider the bigger organisational picture in the decisions they make and the priorities they set for themselves and their teams.
    • For customers: UNDERSTANDING AND ENGAGEMENT. It helps them to see how the organisation operates, how it aligns with their values and how it will provide them with the product or service they require.

    Our clients use our images and animations as both standalone resources and often as part of a wider internal or external communication initiative.

    Another experience our clients have in common is that the more they use our illustrations and animations across their organisations, the better the shared understanding of their organisation becomes. This enables more effective conversations and meetings and, in turn, increases action and productivity – all of which are vital to achieving the organisations aims and objectives.

    You can read more about our clients experiences of working with Crackerjack Visual Thinking on our home page.

    To discuss how Crackerjack Visual Thinking could help your organisation engage people with your story and vision, please feel free to contact us for a no-obligation discussion.

    John Ashton – Founder of Crackerjack Visual Thinking

  • Can your business tick all the boxes in this SIMPLE business health check?

    Can your business tick all the boxes in this SIMPLE business health check?

    It can be easy to lose track of the big picture and get lost in the complexity of running your business. To help with this, here’s a simple template I’ve developed to help you check the health of your business.

    The health check uses the SIMPLE mnemonic to focus on 6 key areas of running a business:

    Systems
    Innovation
    Metrics
    People
    Leadership
    Experience (i.e. customer experience)

    Simply work your way around the template and see if you can tick all the boxes against each of the statements shown.

    If you can tick all the boxes then great! Although don’t be complacent and regularly use the health check to ensure this continues to be the case.

    If you can’t tick all the boxes, take time to examine the reasons for this and plan the actions you need to take to enable you to tick the box.

    Click on the button below to download the SIMPLE business health check:

    simple-checklist-2Download

    If you’d like to talk more about the health check, please do get in contact.

    Regards,

    John

    John Ashton | Crackerjack Visual Thinking

  • As the UK ‘unlocks’, it’s more important than ever to communicate a clear vision for your business

    As the UK ‘unlocks’, it’s more important than ever to communicate a clear vision for your business

    As the countries of the UK emerge from the latest lockdown and progress through their COVID roadmaps, many businesses are opening up for the first time in months and/or having to adapt to how their customers want to do business now that they are used to working in a virtual, working from home, socially distanced, culturally changed (?) world.

    The key question for me is how many of those businesses have taken the time to review their business vision (which maps out the fundamental way in which they operate and details what they are striving to achieve)?

    It’s easy to understand why, in the scramble to get income flowing again, many businesses will not take even an hour to review their vision. But they could well be missing out on identifying fundamental issues that could eventually lead to their businesses being uncompetitive in the new post-pandemic world.

    Realising that you are targeting the wrong customers, using the wrong channels to deliver products or services and using physical office/shop space in an inefficient way are examples of how taking the time to review your business vision can help guard against running your business in the same way as normal – when the ‘old normal’ potentially no longer exists!

    So please, take time to review your vision and make sure it is fit for the future (and not the future as you saw it 18 months ago).

    All the best,

    John
    Crackerjack Visual Thinking

    If you would like to discuss your organisations vision including how to develop and communicate it impactfully, please contact me and visit www.crackerjackvisualthinking.com

  • Achieving your organisation’s Vision: A joined-up approach is vital!

    Having a Vision and then successfully achieving it requires a coordinated approach focusing on three key activities: Communicating, Enabling and Embedding. In this blog episode, I share my thoughts on the importance ensuring you have a joined-up approach to these key activities (and what can happen if you don’t!):

    To discuss achieving your organisations vision in more detail, please do get in touch using the options below.

    Get in touch…

    Phone: +44 (0)115 6483381

    ← Back

    Thank you for your response. ✨

  • Latest client feedback about a rich picture created for the Strategic Consultancy team at AECOM Transportation (EMIA)

    We’re very pleased to be able share this feedback from Steve Walton, Associate Director for Strategic Consultancy at AECOM Transportation (EMIA) in relation to 2019 Business Plan rich picture Crackerjack created earlier this year:

    “Back in September 2018 AECOM’s Strategic Consultancy needed a way to visualise what we do. We wanted to find some way of explaining/demonstrating what we do, and more importantly – why we do it,  to any new members of our team, whether that be Graduates, or Apprentices or even more experienced personnel coming to work for us for the first time. Business process, whilst key to growth and success, is not always the most exciting of topics to learn or be told, even when you are actively supporting progress. However we felt that something a little more dynamic was required to maximise inclusion and understanding in what we do. So we worked with John and came up with a way of selling the story of what we do and why, but in a more engaging and interesting way.

    The idea behind our graphic was simple enough. It was to tell a story. The story was developed so that it aligned with the corporate objectives, and the tools we have available to us. The story forms a roadmap, explaining who we are as a team, what we are trying to achieve, our vison, our values and our clients – both current and future. The graphic provides us with the ability to demonstrate what we do, why we do it, who we do it for and the value it provides to AECOM. It helps people who maybe have not been in the business long, or even visitors to our team visualise the journey we take every day.

    John’s creativity to be able to visualise process and objective was critical here. John has an ability to see things which we sometimes cant, but which are always there. His approach was not one of direction, but simply to bring our story to life through his artwork. John’s work has been recognised by the wider business, and I believe this could be the start of a positive collaboration between AECOM and Crackerjack Visual Thinking.”

    To find out more about our work, please CONTACT US.

  • Running a 2017 Kick-Off event in January? If so, read this! #engage #communicate #visualthinking

    Are you running a kick-off meeting in early 2017 to get you and your team ready for the year ahead?

    Being clear about what you want to achieve in 2017 and how you are going to do this is vital to the success of your organisation.

    60 page PowerPoint presentations and over-long speeches are not the best way to engage with your people and communicate key messages!

    Getting your people really thinking, talking and identifying the actions they need to take to achieve the organisations goals in 2017 will provide you with a much better chance of success.

    To do this effectively we recommend the following steps:

    • Think about when and where you get your people together. If it’s going to be a face to face event, remember that the venue and room play and important role in how energised people feel and how engaged they are with the event.
    • Identify three or four clear organisational aims for 2017. Any more than this and people won’t have the time to really think about the role they play in achieving each of these.
    • Don’t just tell people the information! Help them discover it themselves through activities and discussion. Learning information rather than being simply told it is proven to be the most effective way to really understand and retain information. A graphic facilitation approach which combines facilitation with visual thinking techniques can be ideal for this type of activity.Graphic facilitation involvement
    • Think visually! Wherever possible and practicable, use images and diagrams to complement the other materials you will be sharing with your people. Rich pictures provide a great way of sharing complex information and graphic recording can capture the key thoughts, ideas and comments that emerge during your kick-off meeting.
    • Follow-up after the meeting. Be sure to set up channels that enable people to continue the conversations started at the event. Also ensure that you find a way to visually show the organisations progress against the 2017 goals.
    • Plan ahead! Toward the end of 2017, arrange another event to celebrate success and gather learning’s from the work undertaken in 2017. These can then be used to inform your plans and kick-off meeting for 2018.

    We hope this advice is helpful to you. If you would like to discuss any of the above ideas, please don’t hesitate to contact us.

    John Ashton – Crackerjack Visual Thinking

  • Great feedback about our #Quality #Improvement Toolkit from Oxford University Hospitals #NHS #engage #communicate

    Earlier this year, Crackerjack was commissioned by Belinda Boulton (Director of Transformation for Oxford University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust) to design and produce an on-line interactive service improvement guide for her organisation.

    The ‘Oxford Quality Improvement Toolkit’ brings together numerous quality improvement tools, templates and techniques into one simple to use practical guide that is accessible across all platforms and devices including laptops, tablets and smartphones.

    oxford-quality-improvement-toolkit-blog-image-01

    The toolkit is designed to support anyone (from front-line staff to senior management) who wants to make an improvement in their part of the organisation, whether that’s making a change to a single patient process through to managing a major change programme across a team or department.

    We were extremely pleased to receive the following feedback from Belinda on completion of the work:

    “We knew what service improvement information we wanted to convey. However, we weren’t sure about how to present that information in such a way as to engage our colleagues and enthuse them in relation to our service improvement goals. John Ashton from Crackerjack Visual Thinking listened to our ideas and explored with us the nature of our audience and what would give them an affinity with the ‘Toolkit’. John helped us to bring our ideas to life in the form of an interactive ‘Oxford Quality Improvement Toolkit’, an on-line guide which brings service improvement tools to life. The work was delivered to time frames and exceeded our expectations.  We are looking forward to working with John in the future on other projects.”

    To discuss how Crackerjack could help you in your work, please contact us, call +44(0)775 282 6227 or visit www.crackerjackvisualthinking.com

  • What’s your plan for this week? #achieve #visualthinking

    Monday morning’s here again!

    Do you plan for the week ahead? I don’t mean just ensuring that you know when you’ve got meetings in your diary this week!

    Have you taken the time to think about how the actions you take this week will enable you to achieve your personal and professional goals?

    If not, here’s a visual template for you to complete that will help you quickly get the big picture on your week ahead. Just click on the picture to download it. Hope you find it helpful!

    Plan for the Week Small

    John
    Crackerjack Visual Thinking
    info@crackerjackvisualthinking.com
    www.crackerjackvisualthinking.com