Sky: Creating fantastic facilitators

How can we scale up our internal innovation capability?

Sky is committed to innovation. Operating in such a competitive and fast-moving market means it’s vital that the business can not only anticipate, but set industry trends.

We’ve been working with Sky to rollout the Better Innovation programme – a two-day, custom-built workshop for its 600 leaders, designed to build a culture of innovation across the business. You can find out more about it here.

To further embed Sky’s approach to innovation, Sky set up Sky Labs – its own internal innovation function – which helps teams use innovative mindsets and approaches to solve problems.

Sky wanted to grow the innovation team, so they asked us to create a curriculum they could use to scale up their capability and bring other people from across the business into the team as facilitators.

What we did

We created a brand new, one day session. This featured a series of activities to teach new facilitators the skills and approaches they need to run sessions with colleagues to help them find solutions to challenges.

For example, we created a set of facilitation cards, which include a range of information and tips about facilitation. They also include the personas you can expect to encounter during sessions, such as the most ‘important’ or senior person in the room, and people who are reluctant to participate. We then led a series of roleplays so that participants could experience what it feels like to lead those people, and explore how to engage them.

We also gave our group the chance to practice running sessions and then receive feedback from their peers – and from us – about how they did.

We had great feedback for this session, and the Sky Labs team went onto use the skills and techniques we shared to bring on new recruits.

“This was a fantastic session to work on – we were essentially teaching this group how to do what we do, and it was so interesting. I think my favourite part was when we taught the group ‘Design Improv’. This uses improv theatre methods with design to build on people’s spontaneity when they’re in creative mode to really think about interactions. It’s a lot of fun and such a useful skill to have.”

Nathan Waterhouse,
Treehouse Innovation