In November 2010, Nextel Peru embarked in a company wide process to reignite employee engagement, foster empowerment and develop capacity to respond to new technological and commercial challenges. This process led to the first AI Summit ever conducted in Peru. In October 2011 four hundred members of the organization and 60 external stakeholders gathered for 3 days identifying critical areas for action and developing prototypes to respond to the identified needs and opportunities, ranging from personnel issues to technological solutions.
The Summit was only the culmination of a 10 months journey of inquiry and organizational learning which touched all levels of the organization. The main character of this story is the Steering Committee (S.C.) and the plot is the impact they had in the organization as they prepared the AI Summit, which they called “The Passion to Create Nextel”.
This case illustrates the making of an AI Summit as an organizational intervention to foster employee engagement, organizational capacity and empowerment through the development of an empowered and active S.C. It also highlights the importance of taking enough time to: define the work, build an empowered steering committee, spread the inquiry, make meaning of the inquiry, hear everybody in the room, and time to learn from the process; in the preparation and delivery of an AI summit in order to truly co-create a new organizational reality.