General Mills Sustainability

Making corporate training interesting

Role: Creative director and writer

General Mills needed its employees not just to learn about new emissions standards and spit back the right answers to basic comprehension questions, but to rethink their everyday work in light of environmental and economic necessity.

I worked with my team to convince the General Mills organization to think outside of the normal realms of corporate training. While we needed to create a digital solution for practical purposes, we wanted that solution to go way beyond the normal paradigm of corporate training. In other words, no more required reading and comprehension questions.

But in order to create a result that would really be effective, we needed to build on expertise from within the organization. To get the most out of the sustainability team’s vast knowledge, we collaborated in a weeklong sprint, brainstorming, prototyping, and testing the best ways to communicate, activate, and change the thinking of the whole organization.

In the end, we created an interactive game that moved its players through the supply chain from farm to end consumer, and asked them to make decisions along the way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

The key element of this game was the fact that no question was immediately straightforward. Sometimes the obvious answer was wrong. Sometimes the right answer seemed far too simple. And, in all cases, the questions forced players to rethink parts of their business they’d never before considered.