This programme is designed based on Table stakes format.

Day One: Problem definition

Introduction: The CEO perspective

• Goals for this workshop, and why you’re not competitors
• Change is a chronic side effect of something more important: performance
• Sizing up your organization’s situation by taking the whole-enterprise view
• Exercise: Introduce one another and your biggest fears as leaders

Choosing your audience(s)

• Three connected audience problems: Insufficient relevance, utility, disconnected communities and erosion of trust
• Your audience is not “the public”
• Exercise: The “onliness statement”
• Idea to take home: Hold a user-centered story meeting to arrive at jobs to be done

The business context (as seen from the U.S., but with cautionary notes for the rest of the world)

• Advertising implosion + high fixed costs = a sustainability crisis
• The tyranny of the platforms: How Facebook, Google and others both enable and stifle our businesses
• Mismatched incentives: How volume and quality are often at odds in the digital world
• Exercise: SWOT analysis

Frameworks for problem definition

• The core principle: Test and learn
• Exercise: Identifying pain points + opportunities and describing organizational gaps
• Exercise: Defining the performance you wish to see
• Exercise: Setting SMART goals

Day Two: Leading solutions

Brief review and discussion of Day One

Planning for performance

• Exercise: Designing your strategy tree
• Exercise: What hypotheses are you testing?
• Potential for Change = Dissatisfaction with current state × Vision for future × Process for getting there
• Exercise: Building coalitions

Designing the “digital-first” newsroom

• New skills, new roles, new structures: content strategy, audience development, product development
• Idea to take home: Running content experiments

The audience funnel

• The role of analytics in the audience feedback loop
• What is the funnel? Casual, habitual, paying and loyal
• Ideas to take home: Tactics for every part of the funnel

Change in action

• Exercise: Picking the low-hanging fruit
• Exercise: Moving toward outcomes
• Exercise: Telling your story internally and externally
• How to build and sustain momentum