After all the buzz and excitement from the week of our official launch and our presence as a Gold Sponsor of the AFI Digital Farmers Conference (including CEO Mike's introductory address below), we had the opportunity to hold a day of team building on Friday whilst we were all gathered together in Sydney.
When deciding on the nature of the day's activities and themes that were going to be important to address across the team, we only had to look as far as our name to find the answer.
Throughout the formation of Food Agility, there was a drive to do things a little differently and break away from the typical CRC model by not only funding projects but also being very involved in their design. It was the belief among our founding team that in order to have a lasting impact our projects must be developed from bottom-up principles that were dynamic and agile.
"Agility" is a central component of the work we do in project development and execution, so we thought that it was time to turn the scopes back on ourselves and explore how this methodology can be embedded into our culture and day-to-day operations.
To do this, we enlisted the help of our good friends at X-Lab to run us through the core principles of design thinking and to lead a co-design prototyping exercise for customers of Sydney Fish Market (SFM).
To begin the day, Julian from X-Lab opened up to the room a chance for everyone to express what their existing ideas of design thinking were. Answers such as "collaboration", "problem solving", and "active listening" were all submitted, but following a lengthy group discussion, the one word that was acknowledged to represent the core principles of design was "empathy".
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Empathy, or the ability to put oneself in the shoes of another, was seen as the underlying factor that can distinguish a great research project that delivers wholesome and practical outcomes, as opposed to those without which may have minimal impact or minimal real-world uptake.
The reasons were said to be because research that applies principles of empathy are far more likely to:
These ideas were expressed through the visual representation of traditional vs agile research (below), which summarise our motivations to design projects that are user-centred and incorporate principles of continuous improvement.
We were then sprung to put all our talking about design thinking into practice, when Julian posed the challenge:
"How might we... redesign Sydney Fish Market for a delightful consumer experience?"
In the context of the recently announced $250 million makeover that the NSW Government has granted to SFM, it was our task in groups to go through a fast-tracked design process to try and deliver proposals for the best consumer-led solutions as possible within a two-hour period.
After twenty minutes of frantic talks and questions with passer-by attendees of the market downstairs that day, the groups reassembled and post-it noted all the different opinions and ideas that the customers had expressed when asked about their take on the upcoming SFM expansion.
These thoughts were all collated and compared for each group to select one key overriding problem that they felt needs to be addressed for the expansion to deliver highly positive customer experiences.
The next step was then to brainstorm as many possible solutions to the identified problem, no matter how wacky or wild, to build up an array of activities that could be easily and quickly assessed for their viability and efficacy.
Given the limited time that was available to complete the design process, each group used a consumer journey map as the tool to convey their own prototyped solution for an improved customer experience at SFM. Each group delivered highly creative and innovative prototypes that spanned from "choose-your-own-cuisine" cooking stations, to interactive screens that show the provenance of your fish, to employing knowledgeable concierge staff, even to simply better parking systems.
These vast arrays of ideas were presented and shared amongst the group, and talked through as a form of makeshift testing. Some ideas were championed, and some ideas were agreed to be sent back to the prototype phase, however the lessons learned by the group in going through this agile process were invaluable.
By gaining a hands-on and practical understanding of the methods behind design thinking, the entire team were in agreement that the driving philosophies behind Food Agility will be core competencies of ours as we move forward and begin to undertake in more and more digital agrifood projects.
The day served to unite the team and reinforce the commitment we have made to our partners and stakeholders to deliver solutions to industry problems based on principles on innovation, continuous improvement, and most importantly collaboration.
