The Difference
We challenge the way you work, think, act and connect.
Your expert for questions
Benedikt Schmaus
Partner/Lead The Difference, PwC Germany
Tel.: +49 170 223-8437
E-Mail
The Difference perspective
PwC's The Difference enables our clients to do months of work in only a matter of days, inspiring fresh insights and better business outcomes. We design programs of work and immersive experiences to help organizations solve their most complex problems. Our mission is to challenge and inspire the way people work, think, act, and connect, and in doing so, make a difference.
Why you need The Difference?
The solution’s there for the taking
The Difference is a powerful team of professional co-creators at PwC. Trained to unleash your group genius by challenging the way people work, think, act and connect. Certified in a methodology that’s proven to make the crucial difference for organisations facing highly complex challenges.
The crucial difference: The Design Forum
Incubator? Think tank? Workshop? A Design Forum is even more. It’s a unique immersive experience created by The Difference team to get all your stakeholders together to co-create and unleash group genius solutions to complex problems. Depending on the circumstances, we have the technology to hold a Design Forum on our premises, on your premises, or online with each participant at a different location.
Where it all happens
The environment we create is paramount to the unique success of our inventions – it is as important to the participants as the design of your living rom at home.
We are experts at creating the right environment using our custom built locations, remote facilities and state of the art, secure digital tools.
We help you meet your objectives in physical, virtual or hybrid environments.
The global methodology focuses on three key outcomes:
Alignment
We construct exciting and unfamiliar experiences and tools to help you resolve conflict and align the different perspectives of those participating in the transformation.
Ownership
We inspire an environment of creativity and collaboration so that everyone involved owns the solution – and is committed to making it happen.
Acceleration
We design, structure and manage parallel work processes, accelerating months of effort into only a few days.
“Our entire leadership team worked with PwC on our business vision. We dreamed together, co-created together, challenged each other and used the power of multiple perspectives. What a valuable experience and outcome, it was really magical.”
What your Design Forum will deliver
The Design Forum is where your brightest minds meet PwC’s facilitators to do months of work in only three days. A safe, guided space for those hard conversations and tough decisions. A playful place for turning obstacles into fresh insights and better business outcomes.
The Design Forum gets everyone involved around the table at once – with the right information, facilitators and experts as required. The content and the people are tailored to the client and their problem, but the procedure’s always the same: scan, focus and act.
Scan
We get everyone on the same page by harnessing multiple models of learning to explore new knowledge and make fertile space for collaborative ideas and insights. The outcome is a common platform for participants to engage from, with the individual and collective buy-in you need for a successful solution.
Focus
We accelerate the building and testing of solutions over a number of iterative work rounds, from various vantage points. The aim isn’t to finalise work, but to uncover enough detail that the group can see what’s standing in the way of creating and executing the solution.
Act
The group finalises the solution and details the plan to bring it into reality, identifying the barriers they’ll need to overcome to execute and sustain the change. The goal of this phase is to generate real ownership, momentum and commitment enabling implementation to be significantly accelerated.
Where can we make The Difference?
The Difference has already empowered clients in many industries to create and execute solutions to complex problems:
- The global leadership team of a major consumer goods business seeking to define a new direction for its HR strategy.
- An international financial services provider aiming to develop a blockchain-based venture strategy.
- An organisation wanting to reimagine operations across all levels – from group strategy down to the individual worker’s experience.
- A company looking to resolve critical misalignment between IT, operations, product development and the steering committee within a large transformation project.
- Sustainability: Our own firm defining the future sustainability strategy & execution plan across industries and countries
- Transformation Hub: An industrial products client integrating two business units in a merger and driving a multi year change transformation with our collaborative methods
We’d love to add your solution to our list.
Tackle your most important topics
Vision & Strategy
Align a diverse group on where to go, why, and how to get there.
Operating Model Design
Recreate your operating model, recreate your business.
User Experience
Design for your users; internal and external, current and prospective.
Finance Transformation
Reimagine not only what you do, but how you do it, collaboratively.
Culture & Inclusion
Build a community that elevates your intellectual capital.
Digital Transformation
Be relevant and build trust in new ways, with an eye to the future.
Innovation & Disruption
Evolve your business to stay ahead, not just keep
Workforce of the Future
Prepare your organizazion for the future, in all its glory.
