Dear Sebastian,
I hope you are doing well. Congratulations on getting this mandate. Some readers might not be aware that your “local TV network” may be broadcasting to up to 25 million people!
My first advice is not on method, but staffing. For 30 people, if you have not already considered it, I would strongly recommend working with a trained co-facilitator and you might want to have a third person providing logistical and documentation services.
While an LSP purist would argue that everything of importance for the group will be in their heads and “documented in LEGO models”, the reality is that, even if the client keeps the models, they can get broken. And people can lose their memory or leave the company. Different facilitators use various techniques, from flipcharts, to drawings, to video to capture the stories of the models.
Now, to come to process, you have two days and you are doing strategy. Why not simply run a standard Real-time strategy and make your life simple.
The whole point about long term strategy is that it is way out in the future and while it is still possible to predict the future to some extent, the rate of change of the world around us is continually accelerating and our ability to predict is reduced.
The Business Model Canvas is trendy, but is not necessarily the best tool for your purpose and it has at least 3 key areas that are missing, which are the “competition”, the “environment” and the connections between everything. Basically, the BMC is too restricted for a serious strategy session. So if you stick to what is on the piece of paper, you will miss some of the richness of LSP. Even if the BMC doesn’t mention it, you need the environment, you need the competition and you need the connections. I would also suggest that some of the BMC cells are superfluous for your mandate. It is not really important to be discussing cost structure with 30 CEOs, particularly when the future might bring technological changes that mean you replace actors and news presenters with computer programmers.
The three components could be separate two-day workshops, but if you only have time you are given, I would suggest starting at the highest level.
If I were you, I would ask each group to build their future TV station in the middle of the table, making sure that it contains elements of the Value Proposition, channel, platforms and infrastructure. They can then build customer segments, channels, key resources and key partners, as well as competitors etc., then technological factors, mega-trends and other environmental factors. Do some landscaping and then connections. The revenue streams will only appear once you have built all the connections.
Now I would have each team describe their models to everyone else. This would be an appropriate time to partially mix up the groups, making sure to have a couple of people from each group staying with their model à la World Café.
They can now revise their central model and include additional agents (actors/factors) on the landscape.
Then you would go into scenarios, potentially revise the landscape again, then head towards SGPs. You will probably need to do some more presenting out, before or after the development of SGPs and you will probably need voting on SGPs.
Well, that’s how I would do it (except that I would not specifically use BMC terminology, because they probably have their own vocabulary that they should be using).
All the best,
Eli
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