Successful transformation programs need a few critical ingredients: a room full of smart people, a whiteboard, and a burst of energy. With any luck, ideas will be captured, themes organized into clusters, and everyone should leave the workshop feeling aligned.
Columbus Global has gotten incredibly good at that process. Using Klaxoon, Business Transformation Advisor Toby Mankertz and his team have run roughly 200 workshops over five years by building a repeatable methodology for turning scattered stakeholder input into a prioritized roadmap. It’s a truly impressive system that ensures everyone starts on the same page and turns ideas into action quickly.
But in a recent conversation with Wrike’s Richard Blatcher, Toby pointed to something further out on the horizon, a version of this process that goes even deeper, and it’s a vision Wrike users are perfectly positioned to bring to life today.
From sticky notes to a switch you can flick
Toby’s team runs structured design-thinking workshops to align stakeholders before undergoing a major technology investment. Executives brainstorm, prioritize, and work through a difficulty-versus-importance matrix to figure out what actually matters. It’s energizing, collaborative, and, by Toby’s own account, sometimes bittersweet in hindsight simply because of how much momentum a great workshop generates.
Toby recounted, "It’s common for people to say, ‘Here’s a whiteboard which has got a load of post-it notes on it, which I remember being really excited about when I did that workshop, and now I’m looking at it and I’ve kind of lost my thread.”
When asked what the future holds, Toby didn’t describe a better workshop. He described a shorter distance between the workshop and a living, governed plan.
“If we can flick the switch that says, ‘Let’s translate, let’s just switch that into action. Let’s make a plan directly off the back of that,’ I know we can do that with Wrike as well, on an even stronger basis,” he said.
That’s the opportunity sitting in front of any team already using Klaxoon and Wrike together. Klaxoon is where the ideation, alignment, and prioritization happen best. Wrike is where that output can become structured, governed, trackable execution — without a manual handoff, a re-entry step, or a chance for context to get lost in translation. Toby’s own instinct points to exactly this kind of connected system as the next evolution of the methodology he’s already built.
Reframing what a status meeting can do
Toby’s team builds something called a Value Dependency Map for clients: a visual laid out with business goals on one side, the technology investment on the other, and a deliberate, visible gap in between representing everything that has to change (people, process, data, policy, systems) for that investment to actually pay off.
That map led him to a simple but pointed observation about how most organizations run their steering committee meetings.
“Most people will say, ‘Okay, is the project on time? Am I on budget? Do I have enough resources?’” he said. "I propose we don’t do that. I propose we come at it from an outcome basis and ask ‘Are we still on target to achieve those results?’”
It’s a subtle shift, but it changes the whole conversation. Instead of a status check, the meeting becomes a working session on what’s actually blocking value delivery, and it’s a mindset that translates directly into how a connected Wrike workspace could report on delivery: not just ‘Are we on schedule,’ but ‘Are we still on track for the outcome we said we’d deliver.’
What this looks like to bring Klaxoon and Wrike together
Toby’s own thinking maps almost perfectly onto the problem Wrike is built to solve: giving teams a structured foundation to turn ideas and strategy into consistent, provable delivery.
Picture Columbus Global’s existing methodology with one more layer added. Klaxoon captures the ideas, the alignment, and the prioritization exactly as it does now. Then, instead of a separate export and re-entry step into a tracking tool, that output flows directly into Wrike. And in Wrike, you’ll have workflows that carry the context from the original workshop, governance that keeps every change activity tied to an owner and a value lever, and dashboards built around outcomes rather than just tasks and dates.
Toby’s Value Dependency Map, currently a static visual, could become a living, trackable model, updated in real time as change activities move forward.
That’s the kind of uplevel a Klaxoon and Wrike connection makes possible: the same rigor Columbus Global already brings to ideation, extended all the way through to execution, without a single thread getting lost along the way.
Want the full story of how Columbus Global used Klaxoon to align stakeholders and capture nearly 4,000 ideas across a single transformation program?
