Far East Organization – Building and Scaling Innovative Cultures

Project Scope

Far East Organization is the largest private property land developer in Singapore, with over 750 properties under its name.

Design Sojourn was engaged to design and facilitate a 6-week long hackathon that functioned as a learning platform for Far East Organization’s senior managers to creatively approach real business challenges through the use of the Design Thinking methodology.

The 3 goals that Far East Organization wanted to achieve for the hackathon was:

Developing ideas that can transform their business.
Exploring and validating new business models.
Creating new value through understanding and empathising with their customer’s needs.

The end objective of the hackathon was to develop an innovative culture at FEO that has the tools and skillsets to bring the company to the next level.

The 100 senior managers, GMs and directors, were split into 10 groups to work on 10 challenges. The participants hailed from 4 business units: Residential Property and Leasing, Property Management, Retail and Hospitality. Each group was tasked to define a challenge statement that addressed a pressing business concern. From there, the teams began to work on their challenge statements and reframe them through guided field research and analysis.

Design Sojourn supported the teams’ progress through blended learning that included e-learning, downloadable user guides, face-to-face facilitation, and 1 to 1 mentoring sessions. Our team also helped to prototype and visualise proposed ideas for further refinement and validation.

As the Hackathon progressed, there was a clear shift in mindset of how the participants saw the value they can create for their customers. This led to them embracing a new identity where they were able to show their care for their customers through the creation of unique, and quality experiences for their businesses.

Far East Organisation pushed boundaries to conceptualise ground-breaking strategies and actionable plans after more than a month of intensive Design activities and workshops.

The hackathon’s finale was a management retreat that showcased the prototypes to the senior executives. The best ideas were selected, funded to be brought into further rounds of development after the retreat. All in all, the team of 5 expert facilitators from Design Sojourn provided over 80 hours of face to face facilitation and coaching.