Heineken
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Does a Single Workshop Create Lasting Change, or Do You Need an Ongoing Programme?
Depends what you’re trying to build. A workshop can shift a team’s mindset for a day. A programme, run over months with real checkpoints, is what changes how a business actually operates.
“In the end, it’s about business results. That’s the only reason it exists.”
Paul Hoffman didn’t say that as a throwaway line. He’s a Senior Director at Heineken. He said it because it’s true, and because it’s the test everything else has to pass.
Not culture for culture’s sake. Not team building because it sounds nice on a slide. Business results. That’s it. That’s the whole brief.
The trigger was a reorganisation.
Heineken had just been through a significant restructure. Paul’s department came out of it with a much bigger remit — now globally responsible for capabilities across customer service and logistics.
Bigger remit. Same people, mostly. A lot more ground to cover, a lot faster.
You don’t grow into that kind of responsibility by accident. Somebody has to build the capability to match it. And a single day off-site was never going to be enough to do that
So it wasn’t a one-off workshop. It was a journey.
Fourteen months. Three department-wide events. Management team checkpoints at every stage, not just at the end.
That’s the difference between an away-day people forget by Monday, and something that actually changes how a business runs. One event teaches an idea. A journey builds a habit — and a habit is the only thing that survives contact with a genuinely busy quarter.
And the habit they built was feedback.
“We wanted to develop a culture where feedback was openly given and received.”
Simple to say. Hard to do. Most teams say they want feedback and mean they want agreement. Heineken’s management team used the checkpoints to make it real — after every intervention, talking through what they’d actually do differently, day to day, to make it stick.
A single workshop can introduce that idea. It takes months of checkpoints to make it how people actually behave.
Here’s the proof it worked.
Not a feeling. Not a survey. Paul, eighteen months on, watching it with his own eyes:
“I have seen, in the intervening period, lots of evidence of individuals and groups of people working more collaboratively together.”
“I’ve seen a much more organised approach to mapping stakeholders and engaging with those stakeholders.”
“We’ve had greater speed in implementing our capabilities across a wider number of operating companies than we would have done before.”
Read that last one again. Speed. Across more operating companies. That’s not a nicer working environment. That’s a business moving faster because the people in it stopped getting in each other’s way — and it’s the kind of result that only shows up once new habits have had time to bed in.
So when is a workshop enough, and when do you need the programme?
A single workshop is right when a team already works well together and just needs a shared language for how they differ — that’s most of the case studies we’ve written about.
A programme is right when the business itself is changing shape underneath the team. New remit. New reporting lines. New scale. In that situation, one day of insight gets outpaced by the change itself within a matter of weeks. Heineken needed fourteen months, not because the workshop wasn’t good enough, but because the challenge was ongoing, not a single moment.
What this means if you’re the one deciding.
You don’t need a reorganisation to have this problem. You just need:
● A team whose remit has grown faster than its habits have — more scope, more stakeholders, more speed expected, same old ways of working
● A leadership team who’ll actually use the checkpoints — this only works if the management team owns it, not just attends it
● A results test, not a feelings test — if “did people enjoy it” is the only measure you’ve got, you’re measuring the wrong thing
If that’s where you are, a single workshop won’t move the needle. A journey might.
This isn’t a one-off.
The same thinking plays out differently depending on who’s using it. See how a fast-growing company built a shared way of working from day one with Solventum, how a small charity made every hour count with Working Families, and how two teams broke down a silo in a single day with John Lewis.
Ready to see what this could look like for your team?
Book a call. We’ll talk about your business results, and whether you need a workshop or a journey to get there.