Minda Strategic Foresight
Minda is the largest not-for-profit intellectual disability service provider and employer in SA, providing home and living services, housing, children’s services, short term respite accommodation, supported employment, day programs and community support, and allied health therapy.
An AI-enabled scenario planning project, developed with a cross functional team, used to inform corporate strategy development.
Minda is South Australia's leading provider of intellectual disability services, housing, children's services, short term respite, day programs, community support and allied health therapy. With a name meaning "a place of shelter in protection" in Kaurna language, Minda has been serving the needs of people living with an intellectual disability for over 120 years.
Successive years of financial challenges, sector disruption and changing client needs created a situation where Minda needed to focus on repairing its core operations to ensure long term sustainability. This recovery program is nearing completion, and in conjunction with the development of a new multi-year corporate strategy focused on building upon its success, Minda faces the challenge of gaining a better understanding its future client and how it could best continue to serve them well.
The disability services sector in Australia is undergoing significant disruption and change due to regulatory reform, demographic changes, and the emergence of advanced assistive technologies. Unpacking these changes through traditional strategic analysis was proving difficult due to the complex nature of these challenges and how they would influence each other.
It is also a priority for Minda to engage with many stakeholders, in particular staff outside of the executive team, to develop approaches which could help serve the future client. An innovative engagement using foresight can better inform strategic thinking and also provides an opportunity for emerging leaders within Minda to develop their strategic analysis skills.
The use of strategic foresight in the form of scenario analysis provided a way to look at the disruptions together coherently, overcoming the strategic analysis challenges and achieving the staff engagement goals.
A cross functional working group consisting of senior managers and other emerging leaders within Minda, covering a range of operational and client facing functions, worked together to gather and analyse trends, develop scenarios and assess their impact to Minda.
The working group made extensive use of digital and AI-enabled tools, leveraging their time effectively through auto-generated summaries, classifications and generation of content. Not only did this allow the working group to process a wide range of trend sources and information, it allowed them to work through multiple iterations of scenarios and scenario impacts, strengthening their understanding of the underlying and structural forces relevant to Minda.
The foresight working group followed this approach over a period of 12 weeks, meeting 1-2h each week to work through the following phases:
The working group assessed that the most critical and uncertain driving forces were those living with a disability were:
Based on those driving forces, the following 2x2 matrix of scenarios was developed:
Post project surveys with the foresight working group had the following highlights, based on an average rating from participants:
