A mixed group of consultants, employees and a farm owner experimented Doughnut Design for Business core version
What does a Doughnut Design for Business workshop look like? That was the question of many participants in the webinar I held a month ago. We thus decided to organise a session to experiment together.
Ten persons showed up: an employee from a cosmetics company, an employee from an industrial company, the CEO of a farm, and consultants.
During step 2 - Regenerative & distributive ambitions - the two employees realised they needed more information to generate ambitious, transformative ideas due to lacking the overall perspective of the value chain or due to the technical complexity of the processes. So, we went ahead and focused on the case of the cereal farm near Paris.
The other participants joined in ideating and imagined how the land could recover natural ecosystems while producing food, questioned the relevance of ownership, suggested land sharing for urban, machine sharing, etc.
While the farm is already organic and benefits from exchanging good practices with neighbours, we identified blockers to more regenerative and distributive practices, such as not being the land owner.
However, what seem to be strong enablers are the networks and the purpose:
Collaborating with neighbours is an opportunity to mutualise knowledge and machines,
Partnering with associations helps to transform towards low-tech and regenerative practices,
Challenging the purpose can reallocate the purpose of the land, such as what is this land meant to create: food for today or the ecosystemic conditions to feed future generations?
"This workshop is a great tool to bring a company to redesign its purpose." the CEO of the farm
We concluded the workshop agreeing that bringing businesses to redesign their purposes is so valuable that the workshop should be done over an entire day.
It was also suggested that some participants might be too far from the Doughnut and the natural world, so it would be helpful to provide activities to reconnect with the sensible world before the workshop.
DEAL community, have you experimented with icebreakers or other activities to help participants be creative, perceive the challenges better and/or empathise with the living world?
The next step for me as a facilitator is to continue to share knowledge in French with consultants and companies and experiment with the taster version.
