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Innovation Journey

Duration

6 Months

Number of Participants

44

Type

DISCOVERY flex

Impact

How we empowered a global Siemens team to transform five competing futures into one direction that actually means something.

The Overview

From five futures to one shared direction.
Siemens Building Operations manages automation at the scale of hospitals, airports, and train stations. When their leadership sensed the ground shifting beneath them, driven by restructuring, new technologies, and accelerating market change, they needed more than a vision statement on a slide. They needed something their people could actually stand behind. Over six months, the Creativity Lab designed and facilitated the entire journey: every session, every method, every step of the process. Working with 44 participants across 31 departments, the result was a direction built by the organisation, owned by the people who shaped it.

The Story

How we met.

The head of the Building Management Systems division within Siemens came to the Creativity Lab with something that is harder to act on than a clear problem: a feeling. The feeling that things were changing fast, that the organisation was restructuring, that markets were shifting, and that the usual approach to building a vision would fall short. A status quo analysis, a strategy session, a polished slide. He had seen that movie before. He wanted a vision his people had shaped themselves, one they would actually stand behind. That conversation was the beginning.

The Problem

A fast-moving market and a vision no one owns yet.
The Building Management Systems division was navigating genuine turbulence. New global team structures required alignment across regions and departments. Technologies like AI and digitalisation were reshaping what building automation could and should look like. And through all of it, the organisation needed a long-term vision that was graspable, motivating, and shared across the whole organisation. The risk with conventional approaches was clear: move too quickly, and you end up with a vision that looks good in a presentation and disappears in practice. The division lead wanted his people to be genuine co-authors of whatever came next, with a real stake in the outcome.

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Project

Initiation

The project launched in November with a 1,5 day on-site workshop in Switzerland, bringing together the core team for the first time. The Creativity Lab designed and led the full session, establishing a shared understanding of the challenge, building the initial user journey from the core team’s collective knowledge, and laying the foundation for everything that would follow. One early insight set the tone for the entire project. Every person in the room was an expert in one part of the building operations workflow. Nobody could map the whole journey from start to finish. That gap, between deep individual expertise and shared systemic understanding, became the first thing the team worked to close.

Problem Space

Exploration

Five teams, each composed of participants from across 31 departments, including members of Siemens talent programmes with no prior domain expertise but a strong motivation to shape the future, were each assigned a deliberately extreme future scenario. One team explored what building automation might look like if it were fully gamified. Working through daily one-hour sessions, 66 interviews, and a structured Thinkerbox that delivered random facts and provocative questions every day to keep thinking fresh, each team built a detailed picture of future user challenges. The user journey mapping revealed something that had not been visible before: certain building users interact with their environment constantly and intensively, yet had received little business attention until now. That finding reframed where future opportunity might actually lie. A Challenger Session then brought in perspectives from entirely different parts of the broader Siemens organisation, adding new angles to the work already done.

Solution

Creation

With the problem space mapped, each team moved into solution territory, generating ideas through the same rhythm of daily divergent sessions, structured workshops, and challenger input. The Creativity Lab designed each of these sessions individually, adapting methods, provocations, and formats week by week to match what the teams needed at each stage of the process. The structure was clear, but nothing was off the shelf. The teams were deliberately held in expansive thinking long enough for genuinely new directions to emerge, resisting the natural pull toward early convergence that is common in technical organisations. The result was five distinct future opportunity spaces, each grounded in deep user understanding and shaped by perspectives from across the organisation.

Breakthrough

Execution

The final phase brought the five teams together. Representatives from each group joined a smaller consolidated team with one task: turn five compelling but separate futures into a single, coherent North Star. The Creativity Lab designed and facilitated a Vision Tournament, in which participants generated vision elements, built vision statements, and tested them against each other. Statements that resonated were combined. Directions that overlapped were unified. What emerged carried the fingerprints of the whole organisation. That vision is now moving into implementation within Siemens Building Operations, supported by materials developed with an external agency to make it transportable across the organisation.

Outcome

Forty-four people from 31 departments, investing 60 hours each, conducted 66 interviews and engaged more than 40 external experts over six months. The numbers matter, but the point is what those numbers produced: a long-term vision for building operations that grew from within the organisation rather than arriving from above. Five teams explored five radically different futures. One direction came out the other side, specific enough to act on, broad enough to inspire, and credible enough that the people who shaped it are ready to stand behind it. Along the way, the process surfaced insights that had not been on anyone’s radar, including a new understanding of which building users represent untapped potential for the business. For any organisation navigating rapid change, that combination is rare. It is also exactly what is possible when you give people the right process, the right provocation, and enough time to think.

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