Advance Your Ideas in a Large Organization: Expert Insights

You have come so far already. As we wrap up this stage of our journey, it’s a perfect time to take another moment to reflect on what you’ve learned along the way and to think about where you’re headed next.

You’ve already started to identify sources of information about your organization, but this mission will push you to dig deeper and to think expansively as you search for opportunities to align your idea.

Strategy Scavenger Hunt

Use our Strategy Scavenger Hunt to find and document as much information about your organization as possible.

Identifying and testing your assumptions is a critical step on the path to making your idea not only real, but successful. It’s also a lot of fun! Running these tests will get you out of the conference room and closer to your customers. It’s a chance to get hands-on and learn as much as possible about how your idea and your business model might work in the real-life context of your customer’s lives and your organization’s day-to-day operations.

Think of your assumptions as hypotheses you will need to prove or disprove by conducting thoughtful experiments. While the tests you choose to conduct may not be designed as genuine scientific experiments, the more intentional and rigorous you are about testing your assumptions, the more confident and effective you will be as you refine your idea and your business model based on the results.

Examples of Assumptions/Hypotheses

• The customer segments that will be most interested in X new product are men aged 45-70 who have previously experienced a cardiac episode.

• Customers who use X service after the delivery process is overhauled will report higher than average levels of satisfaction on the standard customer survey.

• A direct email campaign to existing customers will be an effective way to drive interest in X new service.

At this point, you’ve drafted your business model, identified your assumptions, and run the first of several tests to learn more of the information you’ll need to make your idea a success.

That’s a lot of progress! So, what is next?

In this mission, you’ll be laying out some additional groundwork by drafting a 90-day plan that will help you keep learning and moving your ideas forward.

Drafting your 90-day plan will give you the opportunity to:

• Summarize your business model

• Consider key milestones

• Identify additional tests you’ll need to run to position your idea for success

There are many ways to create this type of plan. If you’re looking for inspiration, you can explore examples such as the “one-page cheat sheet” approach. You can use a similar structure or create your own using your preferred project management or planning tool.

Draft Your Plan

Your draft should include the five elements listed below.

Much of the information you need may already exist in the materials you created in previous missions (such as your business model canvas, core insight, SWAG math, and alignment summary). Review those as you work on your plan.

What to Include

• A brief summary of your idea and business model as they stand today, including:

  • The value proposition for customers

  • The potential size of the opportunity

  • The investment needed to move the idea forward

• A clear link between your idea and your organization’s strategy (alignment)

• Your goal for the next 90 days
  (What does success look like at the end of these three months?)

• A list of the tests or experiments you plan to run during this timeframe

• A list of key milestones you will need to achieve over the next 90 days
  (Include tentative completion dates, but remember this is a draft—perfection is not required.)

Now that you have a starting point to think about your message and your audience, this mission will challenge you to exhaustively consider all of the possible content that could support your idea by trying to generate “100 hours of content.”

Identify your communication “comfort zone”

While we all have the capacity to communicate both analytically and emotionally in different situations, most of us have a natural communication style that leans more toward one or the other. If you lean toward analytical communication, you probably feel relatively comfortable incorporating data and examples into your conversations and presentations. If you lean more toward emotional communication, you may think of yourself as a storyteller, or you may find yourself at ease using metaphors to explain your ideas.

Think about which of these two styles is generally more comfortable for you, especially in the context of your workplace.                                                                                                                                                            Brainstorming Instructions

Part 1 of 3: Beginning with the communication style you’re most comfortable with, take 15 minutes to brainstorm as many content ideas as possible to support your core message, using your chosen list as a guide to the different types of content you might use to support your idea.

For example, imagine my idea is a new handle design for children’s toothbrushes. If I’m more comfortable with analytical thinking, here’s what some of my sticky notes might look like:                                      Part 2 of 3: Now it’s time to lean hard toward the other communication style to generate even more content. Take another 15 minutes to continue brainstorming, but this time, use the other list of content types as your guide (i.e. if you started with analytical content, you’ll brainstorm emotional content in this part of the activity).

This part may be more challenging if one of the communication styles is way outside your comfort zone, but both styles will be equally important for communicating your message to different audiences, so don’t give up! If you get stuck, try to think of someone you know who tends to communicate in a style that is different from your own, and ask for their help.

Part 3 of 3: On a large table or whiteboard, organize your sticky notes into rows and columns based on their content type (see example below), and take a picture.                                                                                                                                                                         

Now that you’ve reviewed your purpose and identified your most impactful content ideas, it’s time to turn those ideas into a crisp, clear, and engaging pitch for your idea.

In an upcoming mission, you’ll be recording a 2-minute pitch video. The process of drafting and developing that video will give you the opportunity to practice speaking about your idea succinctly and persuasively, and you’ll end up with an artifact you can distribute to others in your organization as an introduction to your idea.

Draft Your Pitch

Your pitch should be roughly 300 words long for a two-minute recording.

The goal of this draft is not to create a perfect script, just to get your content down on paper in an order you think makes sense.

Much like a story, you can structure a pitch in many different ways, including narrative structures, demonstrations, problem/solution frameworks, and more. To explore some examples of different types of pitch structures, check out this article via HubSpot: “6 types of sales pitches every salesperson should know.”

If you’re still stuck on how to begin, try filling out this simple structure as a starting point (1-2 sentences per bullet):

• The problem your idea will solve

• Why the problem matters (story, data, examples)

• The idea

• How the idea will solve the problem

• How you know it will solve the problem (logic, evidence, prototype, experimental results)

• What you’re doing next, and how they can get involved

Review and Revise

Leave your draft alone for at least a full day.

Then, read it through once from the beginning, and use the following prompts to guide your revisions:

• If your audience read or heard only the first sentence of this pitch, would they be interested enough to continue? If not, revise the first line, or add a new line at the beginning that will spark your audience’s interest.

• Without looking at the script again, can you repeat back the most important benefit(s) of the idea?

  If not, revise or re-write to make those points concise and obvious as possible.

• Will your audience be able to relate to the problem on a personal level? Will they feel that the problem is real and have a sense of urgency around solving it?

  If not, revisit your content brainstorming notes to see if there is an example, a metaphor, or a story you can include to make the problem feel more concrete.

• Without asking any additional questions, will your audience know what they can do to help move the idea forward if you’ve convinced them, it’s an idea worth pursuing?

  If not, revise the end of the pitch to include a clear “call to action.”

  If needed, you may also ask someone to review your draft for a fresh perspective and revise accordingly.

Public speaking is often challenging, and everyone has different levels of comfort with being on camera, so if this mission feels a bit daunting, you’re not alone, and we’re here to help! Luckily, there’s one thing that makes most people feel more confident in these situations: practice.

You’ll find a five-part model for practicing your delivery below, but if you’re already an experienced public speaker and video creator, you may find that you don’t need as much practice as those who are newer to the experience. Please feel free to practice as much or as little as you need before moving forward on your journey.

Before you begin

• Download and print our Practice Guid​​e, which is designed to help you practice and perfect your pitch delivery over four structured practice sessions.

• Print a copy of your script.

• Find a quiet space to practice where you won’t be observed or interrupted.

• Remind yourself to stand or sit with good posture while you practice and use a normal speaking volume (as if you were talking to someone standing a few feet in front of you).

In this mission, you will record a final version of your pitch using the guidance and best practices from the program. Before submitting, you’ll review your pitch against a clear success checklist. Upload your recording to YouTube and share the link to receive structured feedback from a coach or facilitator to help you refine and strengthen your delivery.

YouTube Help

If you’re new to YouTube, the “Upload a video” section of the help center includes a number of how-to resources and instructions to help you get started.

As we wrap up this stage of our journey, it’s another perfect time to take a moment to reflect on what you’ve learned along the way and to think about where you’re headed next.

In the previous pathway, “Make it Real,” you drafted a 90-day plan to continue testing your ideas and your business model. Now that you’ve had some time to make progress toward those milestones, we want to check in and hear how it’s going so far!

As a reminder, your draft plan included the following elements:

• A brief summary of your ideas and business models.

• A clear link between your idea and your organization’s strategy (alignment).

• Your goal for the next 90 days; what does “success” look like at the end of those 3 months?

• A list of the tests/experiments you plan to run during that timeframe.

• A list of the key milestones you will need to hit over the next 90 days in order to complete your tests and achieve the overall level of success you’ve identified.

Please take a few minutes to tell us your meetings with your Engaging a Stakeholder/Partner. I have been going.

Stakeholder mapping is a way of organizing your list of stakeholders, identifying gaps, and clarifying your priorities. In this mission, you will use the stakeholder list you created in the previous activity to create a simple stakeholder matrix.                                                                                                                         Create your map

• Download ours Stakeholder Mapping Template.

• Follow the instructions in the template to create your stakeholder list and associate “map” using the matrix table on the second page.

Note: You may or may not have complete awareness of each stakeholder’s influence (the power to make or break your idea) or interest (positive or resistant reaction to your idea), but you’ll be asked to organize your stakeholders based on those qualities. Make your best guess about each of those factors based on what you know about each person, their role, and their relationship to your ideas or related ideas implemented in your organization in the past.

Additional Resources

• The matrix table in our template has been adapted from Mendelow’s Matrix, a commonly used tool in product management and marketing. You can learn more about it from Oxford’s College of Marketing page.

• There are many ways to organize and manage your stakeholders, so if you are interested in additional templates and tools, explore these resources from Smartsheet: Stakeholder analysis templates.

Planning your first engagement

Before you head into your first stakeholder engagement, it’s important to have a clear plan in mind for what you’ll be trying to accomplish.                                                                                                                                     Make a plan

Consider the following questions as you plan your first engagement:

• Who will you include in the first meeting?

• What is your one, most important goal for the discussion?

• What will you be asking this individual or group to do? e.g. participate directly in a specific task, share the idea with others at their level, approve a specific amount of time or effort for their staff member(s) to collaborate on your project, etc.

Craft your invitation

Depending on your organizational culture and your familiarity with your chosen stakeholder, you may want to consider approaching them in person to request a meeting. However, whether you plan to extend the invitation in person or via email, it’s important to think about how to craft that invitation to set the stage for an effective meeting.

Questions

1. Who will you be inviting to meet with you? What is their organizational role and/or relationship to your idea?

1. What is your one, most important goal for the discussion?

1. If you plan to invite your stakeholder to meet via email, you can also attach or include your invitation if you would like feedback from the coaches.

To complete this mission, engage your first stakeholder by following your plan from the previous activity; then, come back to tell us how it went and to ask any questions you may have about future stakeholder engagements.

Prepare in advance

Before the meeting, review your plan from the previous activity, especially your singular goal for the discussion; you’ll want to keep that specific desired outcome in mind throughout your conversation with your stakeholder. To ensure you are fully prepared to respond to anything that comes up in the conversation, there are a few additional questions to consider in advance:

• How will you open the conversation?

• If the stakeholder doesn’t already know you well, how will you introduce yourself?

• Will you be using all or part of your pitch to introduce your idea? If not, how will you introduce it succinctly and clearly?

• What questions do you think your stakeholder will ask, and how will you answer them?

• What concerns might your stakeholder have, and how will you address them?

Lead the meeting

Please note that while stakeholder conversations are important, they don’t have to be overly formal, depending on the type of person you are meeting with, your goals, and your existing relationship. You may choose to meet in your stakeholder’s office, a conference or meeting room, online (if you work in different locations), outdoors (i.e. A walking meeting), or in a location that is related in some way to your idea.

Questions

After the engagement, come back and tell us about it by answering the following questions:

1. Overall, how do you feel about the conversation with your stakeholder?

1. What was your single most important goal for the conversation, and did you achieve it? Please explain.

1. What do you think you will do differently in your next stakeholder engagement? If there’s nothing you plan to change, please share something you did that was particularly effective.

Let’s take a moment to return to your 90-day plan and talk about the progress you’ve made since the last time we checked in. This time, we’re also going to add a section to the plan based on your stakeholder mapping work from the most recent stage of your journey.

Adding to Your Plan

Now that you have a better understanding of your stakeholders across the organization, it’s a good time to review and include some additional plans for engaging those stakeholders moving forward. You can accomplish this by adding your stakeholder matrix table from Mission: Create a Stakeholder Map to your existing plan, along with some new details about how you will engage with those stakeholders.

Your engagement plan may be highly detailed and tailored to each individual stakeholder depending on your specific context and goals, but at a high-level, you should consider adding some milestones to represent important engagements with each type of stakeholder by considering the following:

• Keeping Momentum: Who are the key stakeholders that are supportive of your idea, and need to be engaged regularly so you don’t lose momentum?

• Gaining Support & Mitigating Risk: Who are the stakeholders that may be resistant to your idea, and need to be heard and satisfied?

• Updates: Who are the stakeholders that need to be kept informed about the status of your idea and/or other details about your progress?

To create thoughtful milestones for your engagements, you should also consider your core messaging strategy and the best ways to reach each type of stakeholder:

• Messages: What critical messages do you need to communicate to each stakeholder group as you continue moving your idea forward? e.g. status updates, requests for participation, key learnings, etc.

• Frequency and Format: How often will you reach out to your various stakeholders, and what communication channels will you use? e.g. email updates, 1-1 meetings, status updates during standing group meetings, etc.

Questions

Take a moment to share your progress:

1. Please attach the current version of your 90-day plan below.

1. Have you been keeping up with the milestones you’ve identified in your plan? If not, what barriers are getting in the way of your progress?

1. What is something you’ve learned from one of your recent experiments or other activities in your 90-day plan?

1. How are you feeling about the stakeholder engagement milestones you just added? Do you have any questions or concerns about those engagements?

Please take a few minutes to share your meetings with your Engaging a Stakeholder/Partner. I have been going.

Questions

1. What’s at least one thing you’ve learned from these conversations over the past few weeks?

1. What have you found challenging?

1. What’s one thing you're Engaging a Stakeholder/Partner. Could do to support you over the next few weeks?

While there’s always more work we can do as individuals to build our skills and become even more effective at making our ideas a reality, we can only achieve true mastery by sharing those skills with others and continuing to grow together. With that in mind, your final mission is to take one small step toward that level of mastery.

In this mission, take a step back from your idea for a moment, and look around your organization for an opportunity to share what you’ve learned from your journey to make that idea a reality. See two examples of how you might start that sharing process below or talk to your colleagues, or you're Engaging a Stakeholder/Partner. About other ways you might start to share your skills within your organization:                                                                                                                                                                      1) Help someone else bring an idea to life

Do you already know someone else in your organization who has an idea worth sharing? Or do you know someone who is new to the company and may have a fresh perspective to offer?

If so, approach them to have a conversation about what you’ve learned, and offer to help them take the first step to move their ideas forward. You can also feel free to share the link to the program [https://unboxyourideas.com/] [https://csli.getdohq.com/] with them so they can explore the material on their own after your conversation.

2) Share a new approach

If you’re participating in any projects right now, ask yourself whether any of the approaches you’ve used in this program might be helpful to that project team:

• Has the team sought customer input?

• Has the team thoroughly considered all of its stakeholders and how to communicate with them effectively?

• Has the team engaged in effective brainstorming or ideation, and have the right people been involved in those activities to encourage creative, divergent thinking?

If you answered “no” to any of those questions, that project may be an excellent opportunity to share one or more of the strategies you’ve learned on this journey. Try approaching the project led to share your thoughts and see if you can convince them to let you introduce a strategy like empathy mapping, customer interviews, an experimental approach, an ideation strategy, or another approach that you found helpful in this program.

Questions

After you’ve shared some aspects of your Changemaker skills in a way that is meaningful for you, come back here to tell us how it went.

1. What did you do to share your learning with someone else in your organization? Briefly describe the context, and why you decided to take this approach.

1. What did you learn from sharing your experience/knowledge with others?

1. What questions do you have for the coaches about sharing your skills with others or supporting others’ Changemaker journeys moving forward?

As our journey together comes to an end, it’s more important than ever to take a few moments to internalize what you’ve learned and ensure you have what you need to continue moving forward after the program ends.

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Final Reflection Questions

1. How do you feel about your progress overall since you started this program?

1. What are the most important steps coming up in the last part of your 90-day plan? Do you have any questions or concerns about those final milestones?

1. What is one of the best strategies, concepts, or skills you’ve learned on this journey, and what’s the first way you think you’ll apply it outside of the program?

1. What is something you wish you had learned or that you wish you had spent more time on?

1. What final questions would you like to share with the coaches to make sure you are setting yourself up for success moving forward?

You made it!

You’ve worked very hard to get to this point, and you should be proud of what you’ve accomplished. We hope you’re as excited as we are about what you’ll do next! But before you go...

Tell Us About Your Experience                                                                                                                                          ​​​? Changemakers Experience Survey (5 min)

By completing the short survey above, you'll gain access to your digital badge, plus a special gift from Cultivate! You'll also be helping us improve our service to you now and in the future.

As you know, no one can improve without thoughtful feedback from their stakeholders, and when it comes to this program, our most important stakeholders are Changemakers like you, so thank you in advance!

Share Your Credentials                                                                                                                                                    Completing the survey above will also grant you access to your Certified Changemaker Badge, which you can use to showcase your skills on LinkedIn and your other online communities, including our Cultivate Community for Corporate Changemakers.

Keep in Touch

We’re here to help you and others in your organization grow as Changemakers, and we love to hear stories about our Changemaker alumni bringing their ideas to life. Stay involved in the ​​Cultivate Community to connect with other Changemakers, access new content and resources, ask questions, and share your success stories with us!

? steve@cultivateall.com

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You can also add the email above to your contact list or bookmark our website so you can always reach us if you have questions. We'd love to hear from you.

and most importantly...

THANK YOU!

From the bottom of our hearts, thank you for taking this journey with us and for giving yourself permission to color outside the lines and make your ideas happen! You’re a Changemaker now, and we can’t wait to see where it will take you.

Remember, this work is never done, but your accomplishments are worth celebrating, so congratulations, and good luck!