When Collaboration Goes Deep

We love when clients come to play big because we all end up playing bigger. ZS Associates is a global sales and marketing firm that has managed to be as nimble as the day they started 30 years ago. And they’re determined to stay that way. They approached Sunni Brown Ink with the big idea of embedding a team of nine (yes, NINE) infodoodlers, one each within nine different groups of their consultants at the company’s Leadership Summit. Each group working to create a vision of ZS in 2025, each infodoodler there to visually capture the output.

From our first call about the event, things quickly took a turn for a deeper collaboration. We may be two different kinds of consultancies, but we’re both in the business of optimizing interactions and outcomes. ZS wanted to create a deeply immersive experience for their associates, and loved the idea of creating an agenda based on Gamestorming techniques to further free minds and encourage brainstorms. We worked closely with ZS to support their in-house facilitators in leading each group through a future-focused afternoon, with our own team there to both illustrate and co-pilot the experience. Even better, we got to see collaboration as culture. It’s not so easy to walk that talk — to activate mission and vision with real aplomb. So it was exciting to witness an all-hands, all-in, all-out imagining of the year 2025 and what ZS and their people hope to be and do, especially since infodoodling and gamestorming was helping to take them there.