Strategy Sprint Day 1 - Our vision isn't there quite yet, but our context is

That was a fun start to our Strategy Sprint. Early this morning, the Mobility Lab team (and friends) rocked up at the local library (great WiFi, great atmosphere, and tea and coffee!) for a day of serious strategising about the future.

We started off by having quite a discussion about defining what our vision should be. And this is far, far harder than you think it is. Coming up with one sentence or statement that defines where you want to be in a few years time? Much, much tougher than it sounds. And it generated a lot of great debate. Should we focus on community engagement? How about strategy making? Should we change the world or just a few people? Who are we looking to change?

In the end, we decided to be democratic about it. We wrote down a variety of future visions, and put them to our social media and Slack channels. And we have loved the comments so far. Plenty to ponder over.

Then, onto sketching out the future space within which Mobility Lab would operate. We starting off by literally brain dumping all of the trends that we thought could affect us over the next 5 years. Wider mobility trends, cultural trends, and trends specific to our market. We brain dumped and discussed 20 in all. And this was surprisingly hard as well. Thinking of trends against the clock, and identifying evidence in support of them, is very tricky to do. It's instinctive knowledge much of it. But evidencing it? That's a whole other ball game. But we did it.

Then, we identified the most important trends to us. This was a very loose metric. These weren't to be the trends that will have the greatest impact on Mobility Lab, but the ones most important to our key stakeholders, potential clients, anyone really. This made it very easy to identify 5 key trends of importance for the next 5 years. They are:

• Digital enablement matures, where technologies that enable community engagement become common and established across the public sector.
  
• Less strategy, more doing, where transport strategy teams focus less on thinking and analysing, but acting across sectors and silos, and testing their strategies.
  
• Increased citizen activism, where citizens and citizens groups are taking more direct action in all areas of public policy.
  
• Making our world a better place, where such activism is channeled into local projects.
  
• Changes to laws for new transport technologies, where existing laws are liberalised in favour of new mobility services using new technologies.
  

To finish off the day, we took these trends and developed a narrative of the future. And where we sit at the heart of it. Storytelling is what we love doing the most, so writing this up and publishing it was most definitely the most fun part of the day!

So, what do you think?