The challenge
Fonterra‘s Global Regulatory, Response and Services Lead Team (GRRS) operates in a high‑stakes environment, protecting market access, managing incidents and ensuring regulatory compliance. Leaders recognised they were defaulting to fast “solution mode”, moving with pace but sacrificing deeper questioning and problem definition. They wanted to develop design thinking capability to improve decision-making and innovation.
How I helped
I facilitated an immersive four-hour, design thinking workshop for GRRS. The session seamlessly integrated an experiential challenge, developed insights on workplace challenges, used advanced design thinking frameworks (DUCTRI), providing hands-on learning of discovery and understanding tools.
Participants confronted real-world challenges embedded in their GRRS context and concluded by defining actionable strategies to infuse their daily routines with more curious, design-driven questioning.
The impact
The workshop powerfully reset the team’s expectations around pace, revealing that strategic deceleration at the outset delivers more robust downstream decisions. Participants rated the session highly and asked for follow-up sessions to go deeper into the tools. GRRS has embedded a weekly reflection slot into its stand-up meetings, where leaders actively share stories of deploying open, investigative questions with a design-led mindset, solidifying the workshop as a catalyst for ongoing capability growth.
“Our team really enjoyed getting out of their comfort zones and learning new design‑thinking skills and tools. We’re often forced into solution mode and to move with pace at the expense of deeper questioning. This workshop helped us slow down, ask better questions, and we’ve now built a weekly reflection into our stand‑ups to practise a more design‑led mindset.” — Senior Manager, Global Regulatory Innovation, Fonterra