We were delighted to be back with Zespri International recently working with some fantastic people – members of the Innovation, Sustainability and Supply Chain teams, as well as external stakeholders.
Our objective was to work with Zespri’s Innovation Team to help them identify the key focus areas to support their climate change activity.
Thanks to Juliet Ansell and Samantha Walmsley-Bartlett for hosting this session and all those who participated. The diversity of perspectives certainly widened the option field!
What We Did
We started with the Future Backwards exercise to explore the range of perspectives from the group on impossibly good and bad futures to surface what we want to move towards and away from.
We wanted to lock in a direction of intent, rather than specific scenarios.
Then we mapped the constraints in our environment based on the energy (effort, resources etc) and time required to change the constraints, Time/Energy Mapping based on Dave Snowden’s Estuarine Mapping method.
Constraints ranged from things of a structural nature, to regulatory elements, to the attitudes of people affected.
These constraints can be seen as limiters or enablers of action (or both) depending on the context.
The resulting map indicated that some things are very hard to shift. The team can’t change them now, but can monitor them to see if an opportunity arises in the future.
Other things are a lot more possible to control and this is where we focused on, in order to take action on areas that would bring the most impact.
The next step for the team is to refine these further into specific research projects and other exploratory actions as part of their strategy.
Adaptive Strategy
This all fits with the AGLX’s Adaptive Strategy process.
We start from where we are today – understanding our current state in terms of our constraints. This gives leaders a clearer view of where to focus time and energy in order to make the biggest impact.
We deliberately avoid idealised future states. They can sound good in an offsite workshop, but can be unclear what that means in reality when you hit work on a Monday morning!
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