For the second time this year, an EIIL workshop was hosted by our friends West Midlands in Europe (WMIE) at their excellent facilities right in the centre of the European quarter of Brussels.With the Chateau bursting with Chinese students on a two-week under-graduate business studies programme sponsored by the Brussels regional government and Solvay Business School, the EIIL agreed to move to the relatively peaceful WMIE facilities for its workshop 'Understanding Aims for Strategy Development'(HPL3).

Workshop Director John Doerr, helped participants from regular Members CB&I Lummus,Bayer Material Science, Shell and energy sector consultants Eira, understandthe importance of identifying and aligning the aims of all stakeholders if aneffective strategy is to be developed.

Not short of ambition, the two workshop teams turned their attention to tasks including 'Recover from the Gulf Oil Spill' in order to illustrate how the aims of multiple stakeholders, both conflicting and complimentary, can be captured in a network.

Using the network to subsequently identify the purposes of subsidiary tasks to be tackled by different stakeholder groups, and for the end products of these tasks to take account of the purposes of others in the network, was agreed by all as a powerful technique for tackling even the biggest of strategyissues.

'We've found it very helpful in addressing our Talent Team project' said Alexandra Grosse-Boewing of Bayer Technical Services. 'We have used our real project as a task in this workshop, and we now have a good idea of how to narrow down the task to deliver something which we think will be useful. We have a meeting with (BMS CEO) Patrick Thomas in a week's time and this gives us a structure we can use to test his views as a key customer of our project.'

And at coffee breaks both teams reflected on the Brussels skyline and, for several, their first sight of the European parliament building. An appropriate setting for them to consider their second workshop key task: 'help the various economies of Europe recover from the global recession.'