Accenture: Festival of Ideas

Accenture Ireland brought about 900 of its consultants together for a single day in February 2012. The executive team had set the direction in four themes, named Winning Together, Competitive Delivery, Taking Ownership and Being Innovators, and the day's work was for the staff to say what each of those meant for their own part of the business.

The venue was partitioned into twenty hexayurts, five to a theme, which the staff built themselves as the first task of the morning. Two hundred discussion topics had been settled in advance through an internal market, each with a lead to host it and a note-taker to write it down.

Stef built Convotate, the web app the note-takers worked in. Every yurt ran its own copy and all of them were connected, so a remark typed in one conversation was on the network the moment it was written. He took it from idea to working prototype in a couple of days, then hardened it to run on a corporate network.

That feed drove the visualisation, which the event called the Brain. It showed the venue as a map, the four themes as four coloured quarters with the yurts numbered inside them, and ideas, photographs and tweets landing on the yurt they had come from. Toby Harris built and ran it, Ciaran Lucas illustrated, Caroline Beavon worked the data and Carolyn Jones held it all together, from a bank of laptops at the side of the room. Boz Temple-Morris produced the event and brought the team in.

Over two thousand ideas went through it during the day.