Quintiles needed a new competitive advantage: one built on client relationships nurtured over time rather than quick, short-term sales.
After a series of stakeholder interviews, it became clear that the changing dynamics within their industry required a fundamental shift in how the team operated. Moving away from short-term sales would mean reimagining everything: internal deliverables, expectations, offerings, and especially how they interacted with their customers.
Our task was to design an experience that introduced this strategic shift in a way that built conviction, adoption, and genuine engagement among sales leadership.
Approach
Designing for a long-term mentality
We identified three umbrella themes to guide the design of a two-day retreat:
Maturity
Relationships that build over time toward deeper understanding.
Investment
Today's actions for tomorrow's benefits.
Cultivation
Processes and practices that culminate in something greater.
The Wine Angle
Ever the fans of learning from outside experts
Looking at the themes, I knew immediately where we would look for inspiration.
This is wine!
For 5 years I had been working part-time in the California wine industry, learning from winemakers and grape growers the long, slow investment it took to get a bottle on the table. The umbrella themes translated perfectly to the long-term perspective required in winemaking: planting root stock, three-year growing cycles, barrel aging, blending, all the way to the glass.
Working through the wine analogy gave the team:
A way to explore the strategic shift through an accessible but genuinely curious topic.
A shared language they could carry back and apply to their own offerings.
Perspective from experts with decades of experience in long-term thinking in business and relationships.
A communal experience to serve as a foundation for their new direction.
Day Two
Applying the lens
With the wine analogy as a shared frame, we brought the team back to their own context on day two.
Working through a series of structured exercises, the group identified current systems that would need new approaches, surfaced the barriers standing in the way, and began prototyping new solutions. By the end of the day, every participant had developed a concrete ways-of-working experiment they could immediately implement to begin actioning change.
By the end of the retreat, the team had an intimate understanding of what it means to work with a long-term mentality, and a felt sense of the subtle rewards it reaps.
Getting their own custom blend of wine didn't hurt either.
Nobody does amazing work alone.
This project was made all the better with:
Curiosity Atlas