Module 16
To the team admin: Your special workshop role continues; you are the leader! In each section of each session, play the videos at the right time, read out and share the text and instructions on screen, lead the activities, and record the outcomes from each. Don’t forget to allocate another team member as timekeeper to keep you on track!
What you need
A whiteboard, 3 flip charts, paper, post-its, breakout spaces. For online teams, zoom breakouts and chat can be used in place of rooms and post-its.
How much time it takes
This workshop is designed to be undertaken as 3 separate intensive yet fun sessions, with a min. 20-minute break between each to mentally reset.
Change it up
Know how your team works best and customise the workshop for them. Longer breaks? More discussion? More breakouts. Do it!
Activity: Thinking from the ground up
If you started this business from scratch today, with everything you now know, what would you build? What would you do differently? What would you leave behind? How would you do things better?
The companies that have led in triple bottom line — think of Unilever’s Sustainable Living Plan, or GE’s Ecomagination — got there by rethinking from the ground up. They asked bold questions and broke away from old assumptions. That’s what we’re doing now.
Today’s first session is about pushing boundaries, bringing to light bigger plays that could fundamentally move the needle on People, Place and in turn and above all, Profit.
These ideas form the basis of action for your bespoke multi-year horizon strategy.
It starts with the ideas you came up with in pre-work, grows with new ideas and critical analysis today, and all comes together in our action plan in just a handful of weeks from now.
Today, be creative, clever, unbounded and know that the ideas you come up with can have a big impact on your business, all the people in it, and all the people and places around it.
20 minutes
We have a lot to do in this session to pull everything apart so we can put it back together, and we will start by breaking into small groups.
In your group, discuss and record on post-its:
Why it exists
How it limits your business
Possible alternatives
Bloated and outdated inventory — list 5–10 areas of excess cost, complexity or irrelevance:
Stick the post-its around the room and do a walk-around so you are familiar with everything raised by the rest of the leadership team.
Activity: What’s the big idea?
40 minutes
What you have created in the last activity and in your pre-work is a list of areas that need reviewing, addressing and evolving within your business. These are inspiration!
As team, this is not the time you need to make decisions, it’s the time to talk, debate, and test the merits of the ideas.
Take 30 minutes to discuss the ideas that you agree are worth focusing on, and add the five greatest priortity ideas to the form to enable them to be explored further.
Let’s start this session with another story.
A few years ago, a global retailer (if you think about it, you’ll probably know which one) set an ambitious goal: eliminate single-use plastic packaging across all product lines.
It sounded great. Bold. Timely. A clear signal of commitment to sustainability.
They announced it publicly, hired a sustainability team, put posters in stores and rallied the press.
But behind the scenes… the plan was vague. No one had properly mapped out what would replace the plastic, how much it would actually cost beyond estimates, what suppliers would need to change, how it would impact shelf life, logistics, or product pricing.
Within 18 months, the initiative collapsed. Not because it was a bad idea but because no one had really built it out properly.
Now compare that to a competitor in the same market. Instead of making a sweeping announcement, they started with pilots. One store, one region, five national products. They mapped cost implications, customer response, supplier barriers, packaging prototypes, marketing angles. They built the idea until it was robust enough to scale.
They rolled it out nationally, then globally.
Today, that second company is a case study in sustainable retail, and the first company is a cautionary tale.
This is the difference between having an idea and building an initiative.
And this next session is where that difference gets made.
You’ve generated bold thinking. Now it’s time to get sharper, more detailed, more deliberate.
No matter how exciting the idea sounds, it only adds value when it has shape, when it’s been stress-tested, and when it can be explained, costed, and delivered.
This session is about creating that bigger picture, and mapping what we’re imagining in more detail, so we can see where to focus, and if we have in fact prioritised the right ideas.
Activity: Power plays
60 minutes
Around the room, you now have a set of potentially amazing major initiative ideas that could change the face of how your business operates, is viewed, and of course, how it quickly and sustainably it grows.
But right now, these ideas are superficial, there’s no real ‘guts’ to them, nothing that makes them real, or tests that they will really achieve what you want them to achieve.
This session is all about taking just two or three big ideas (depending on time) and really building them out. It’s teasing, testing, and taking ‘we could do more recycling’ to ‘we could introduce a holistic program called Ecoimagination’ and here’s the basics of what that looks like.
As a group:
Work together first to identify which of the 3Ps applies to each of the prioritised ideas(s) you had on the walls, then discuss how the combination of those Ps will lead to growth; be granular and analytical. We need to see, understand and acknowledge that profit doesn’t stand alone, it is a result of the other Ps working as they should. Hint: if one idea caters to all 3Ps, you may just be onto a real winner.
Of course, these answers won’t be perfect or final today, they won’t be 100% accurate (some will be ballpark at best), or fully teased out, but they should be enough to start to shape the idea from just a line, into a recognisable opportunity.
Once you have done this for the idea(s), it’s time to discuss again, play devil’s advocate and again decide if this is the idea(s) for you.
Don’t be disheartened. It’s not unusual to go through this whole process and at this stage, realise the idea(s) you thought was it, isn’t it.
And that’s a good thing, it’s better to know now, then to find out later. As told in our story, too many businesses dive in without fully teasing out an idea, invest in it, spend money and time on it, and only then realise it was never going to work for them.
If you realise now, this idea isn’t for you, don’t panic, you have a whole list of ideas, move on and tease and test out the next one.
Activity: Power plays
Big ideas can only go so far on belief alone. To be taken seriously, and to stand a chance of being resourced, they need to be made credible. Today, we’re taking the next step: moving from concept to case.
This session is about pressure-testing your big ideas in the real world of business decision-making; and the good news is the last session had you asking all the right questions and coming up with all the right answers to make this easier.
You’ll break into three groups again. Each group will take your one idea/initiative and build a business case compelling enough to put in front of the executive team. That means it needs to be clear, strategic, backed by evidence or logic, and demonstrate how it delivers across People, Place, and Profit.
You’re not just pitching an idea. You’re making the case for investment, focus, and delivery.
Your business case should show not only why the idea is worth pursuing, but how it could be executed, what success looks like, and what the return might be — whether that return is commercial, reputational, social, or cultural.
Remember: this isn’t a performative pitch. It’s a serious piece of strategic design work, and it should be good enough to walk into a boardroom tomorrow.
Executives in the room will not join a group as you will be assessing these business cases later. Instead, bring your business minds to help your team; move around and ask them questions, challenge them and tell them what you’d need to see to consider these ideas viable.
Form three groups. Each group selects one major initiative from the previous sessions, ideally one with momentum or support in the room. If multiple initiatives are strong contenders, decide by vote or facilitator allocation.
Begin building your business case. Fill in and submit the template below to:
Define the purpose and scope of the initiative
Lay out the strategic rationale
Map the 3P impact
Estimate costs, timelines, and resource requirements
Identify risks and assumptions
Provide a high-level outline of rollout and governance
Keep your audience in mind. You’re writing for an executive team who want confidence, clarity, and alignment. Assume they will need to:
Understand it quickly
Defend it to others
Allocate money or people to it
Measure whether it works
If you don’t complete your business case before the session ends, please complete it outside the workshop and submit in the form here, one week before the next Executive Session.
10 minutes
Wow! What a session! That one was kind of intense wasn’t it? Also hopefully incredibly productive. If you look back on what we have achieved now, since our very first kick off meeting, we hope it excites you as much as it does us. By now, the way you think, assess, the way you even approach process, is starting to really pivot, and you also have the makings of one hell of a growth plan, fuelled by a 3P strategy that will help future-proof your business against the challenges the world will throw at it!
