A case study in clarity.

Very Clear Ideas and How Are You?
How Boots and Public Health England used the clearing process to help them collaborate

“In the spring of 2019 I was asked to facilitate a session with two organisations who wanted to work together, who had a cultural alignment that they wanted to see in the public domain. In short they wanted to make a difference to the health and well-being of as many people as possible in 2020.

The two organisations had worked together before, but only a little and with limited impact - although always within a great relationship; they had struggled to define what they could both bring to a successful partnership.

I wanted to use very clear ideas as the solution to the problem. Very clear ideas could give the partnership it’s ‘north star’ that was so needed to enable the group of leaders to reach conclusions on what they could achieve together.

The very clear idea that was created was;

Boots and Public Health England (PHE) will partner to deliver easy to adopt, inspirational, personalised and accessible customer experiences that empower and motivate people to make a sustained change to their health and wellbeing, whilst reducing pressure on the NHS.

As a north star, everything the partnership would create from now on in would have to be measured against this as the raison d’etre. The How Are You tool existed, was proven and used, the idea behind the north star though was to enable it to offer more, to offer a customer journey that enabled the population to stay engaged in that journey for the whole of 2020, to enable Boots to promote the solution to a wider audience and to truly ‘super size’ the appeal of health and wellness measured change.

The tool was created in the way the partnership had envisaged and went live on time, both organisations were thrilled on day one with no advertising over 100,000 UK citizens had landed on the quiz and after just over a week close to half a million citizens had found the quiz and were now making a difference to how they lived their lives day to day in January of 2020.

The very clear ideas process works, it works as a way to build engagement and agreement in an idea and it works to ensure that the engagement sticks. It works as a grounding tool when scope creep is rife. Very clear ideas enables the original idea to stay held by everyone involved.

Since using the process for this work Boots has used it to create a north star for Christmas 2020, to deliver the vision for the Transformation team and to assist the Marketing leadership team build ‘guard rails’ for their RACI process.

Very Clear Ideas works!”

- Richard Corbridge, Director of Innovation, Boots UK