Our main service is facilitating the co-design of Smart Projects: innovative projects that address pressing societal needs in a way that attracts the required investors, are technically feasible and environmentally compatible, and are supported by all stakeholders.
We enable the creation of these projects in a systematic and structured approach.
An example of such an approach created for wind energy projects is documented here.
Assess
We help you, your team and your key stakeholders be clear about your stakeholder risks and opportunities. This includes situational analysis and cognitive / confirmation bias mapping, and others as required.
Team clarity strengthening
We undertake a deep dive to clarify your stakeholder challenges and opportunities. We do this with your team (and some close stakeholders, as required). We map out where people think they are at, where they are at, and where they need to be. By being fully aware of where we currently are, roads to future goals become clearer.
Risk & Strategy Workshops
Tailor-made workshops identify and join the dots. They hold up a mirror for you and your team to see what your stakeholder challenges and opportunities are and ways to address them. Team cohesion is strengthened and next steps are clarified.
Results include:
- Clarity on where your project is adding or subtracting local value - what is your project's Net Gain sum?
- Everyone from your senior management to your implementation teams and key stakeholders are focused on the right things at the right time.
- Stakeholder-related risks and opportunities are clearer understood and are being managed.
- Synergies between your project with local long-term development become part of your projects design briefs.
Coaching and capacity building
We strategize, plan and build capacity with your team so that they have the understanding and skills to deliver Smart Projects for you.
Smart Leadership and focused team
We help your team to grow to resolve all pressing issues identified during the assessment.
Champions within your team and their key stakeholders are identified and supported to ensure all material issues are addressed in a timely, professional, and confidence building manner.
Smart Engagement Strategy & Plan
The engagement and co-design required to ensure all stakeholders fully understand and support the need for your project is readied.
Smart Project co-design processes and skills
Your team becomes fully capable to co-design Smart Projects wanted by you and by your projects’ neighbours.
Co-design in action
Having prepared the foundation, people and processes, we help you and your stakeholders get the job done: design together the best possible project and ensure it gets rolled out as required.
Co-design a Smart Project
At all times, we help you ensure that there is enough trust, capacity, and willingness to enable internal and external stakeholders to work together to design a project that makes sense for all of them. One good for business and good for the community. A Smart Project.
This may include the creation of:
- a highly functional multi-stakeholder forum to oversee the decisions that are needed to arrive at a Smart Project,
- participatory/joint baseline studies and impact assessments,
- designs and management plans that deliver for both the investors, developer and the host community,
- acceptable risk and opportunity monitoring regimes that ensure the delivery of the agreed standards, goals, and impact-benefit agreements,
- win-win solutions through principled negotiation,
- community and authority permissions (permits) and social license to operate, and
- an agreed project implementation plan.
Implement a Smart Project
We will work with you to:
- nurture relationships throughout project implementation that are important for all stakeholders' reputations (this includes you),
- proactively share feedback to manage risks and expectations, and monitor impact-benefit agreements,
- ensure that all the involved are willing to keep engaging and open to understanding each other,
- report on progress and challenges (link to GRI or other reporting framework if useful),
- audit and protect the shared social license to operate.