Rotterdam’s Willem de Kooning Academie (WdKA) is home to over 2’100 students and 450 staff members who make up a range of bustling communities full of expertise, inspiration, and creative practices.
As a result of past organisational developments, WdKA found itself in a position where everything was moving while no one was entirely sure of the right direction.
It became clear that WdKA needed to find way to harness this immense potential again. However, this time, it should no longer be defined top-down but developed together with the organisation.
With the mandate of the executive team, we quickly started to assemble a powerful learning community from all levels of the organisation. This entrepreneurial core was key for keeping the participative strategizing process on track.
Together, we engaged in range of mapping sessions to gain perspectives on WdKA’s identity, what it does best, the current challenges in education, and how it is situated in the city of Rotterdam.
By connecting past and present, we turned these perspectives into opportunities. We developed concise directions through crafting a range of strategy prototypes and testing them with the organisation and beyond. The geneerated resonance was essential to uncover blind spots and gain momentum with the organisation members.
Finally, we made sure to concretise the strategy in a range of formats: From classic documents to interactive tools.
For strategy to work, it must resonate with the people who engage with it every day. That’s why we focused on strengthening the routines that connect strategic movements to concrete initiatives.
Thanks to the participative process, every strategy movement already had ambassadors within the organisation to push its agenda forward. The only missing element was the establishment of a routinised way of strategizing to sustain this work.
At the same time, the past engagement from across the organisation created a sense of certainty in times of transformation, allowing for decisive decisions to be taken. All resulting in WdKA moving into the future stronger than ever. Not with a fixed plan, but a clear strategy how to move forward.
