For ideialab “everything starts with a dream”, and their dream is for Mozambique to be an entrepreneurial country. This enterprise, founded in 2010 by two Mozambican women, believes that entrepreneurship holds the potential to transform the world – to create a more inclusive, more harmonious and fairer society. Since inception ideialab have been enacting their bold vision of empowering entrepreneurship in Mozambique, by supporting micro, small and medium enterprises from idea, to inception, to business consolidation. Through incubation, acceleration and ecosystem building programs, ideialab have enhanced entrepreneurial capacities for sustainable and innovative business development in Mozambique and beyond.

The Challenge

For visionary organisations however, there comes a point where past successes become the floor and not the ceiling. In consideration for the next 15 years of ideialab, it was time to consider a new strategy of future-building and leadership. The two co-founders have steadily been building  a broader leadership team, but wanted a clear and co-created roadmap for what was to come next. What was needed was strategic visioning, sense-making, possibility-imagining and most importantly, synchronisation and alignment, to uncover a shared view of potential strategic pathways for the short-, medium-, and long- term future, and to begin to sketch a roadmap on how to get there. Ideialab invited InkDot to help them on this journey.

The InkDot Approach

Our approach began with zooming out to zoom in. Starting with a phase of deep discovery work to understand the organisation’s current climate, their context, their work and their own reflections on each of these, this scaffolded the design of a two-day retreat where we came together with ideialab’s leadership team – the ‘Drivers’ – in the beautiful coastal resort in Ponta d’Ouro. The retreat was a space to think together, have robust discussions and strategise for the future. 

Our methodology for strategy development is  not about predicting the future, but rather preparing for it, and equipping the team with the tools and  mindset of adaptability to meet the future boldly. We began with visioning prompts to help participants visualise the future (the world in 2040) and ideialab’s place in it.  This surfaced the many possibilities for ideialab in the complex and dynamic context of Mozambique. Together we built worlds, allowing the team to orient themselves towards (and in) the future – imagining what is possible and what it takes to get there, while staying anchored in the realities of the present. The group crafted four divergent future scenarios based on two key variables relevant to ideialab’s context: the level of stability and investment in entrepreneurship in Mozambique. The team mapped out the organisation’s potential responses in each of these  possible scenarios, identifying the common threads, adaptive strategies and critical considerations present across the possible futures. Using foresight tools, we discovered that from the least favourable and the most challenging scenarios, emerged the most bold, imaginative and innovative solutions.   Throughout the retreat we balanced structure and creativity, creating moments of imagining, reflection and strategising, and space to surface tensions, polarities and strong opinions as fuel for discussion. The process also emphasises strategic decisions about ways of working and the organisational and leadership implications of delivering the defined strategy. Because of this, and the highly co-creative methodology, the team leaves feeling equipped to make the strategy live beyond the document.

The result

After the retreat, InkDot delivered with a write-up of the insights, reflections and outputs of the process. It was clear, and deeply inspiring, that ideialab are entering a new chapter, ready to level up their unique approach for broader impact and influence in the entrepreneurship ecosystem: from impact for entrepreneurs, to impact for the ecosystem of actors; from entrepreneurs that start and run micro and small enterprises, to entrepreneurs that are building innovative, medium-sized (and beyond) businesses; from being a credible player in a fragmented ecosystem, to being an influential convener and partner of the ecosystem.

We followed up with  ideialab’s leadership team, hosting a virtual “afterparty” to synthesise and validate the work done during the retreat and define clear “wise next steps”. This session allowed InkDot to crystalise  alignment around a shared strategic vision, articulate an actionable trajectory for how to get there and leverage the energy and momentum from the retreat. We also spent time refining the strategic direction that was co-created, and produced the final ideialab Strategy – 2025-2040, a 10 page strategy document (now approved by their board) to use as an internal compass, and the foundation for external engagement.

 

“We worked with InkDot on two connected priorities: our leadership team’s annual strategy retreat and an organisation-wide climate assessment. Across both, InkDot’s commitment to a thorough and attentive discovery phase stood out to us. Thanks to this discovery process (through interviews, reviewing org material, getting to know us, etc.) InkDot gained a deep understanding of us as an organisation and the strategic moment we were in. This ensured a truly tailored project design that considered our specific needs, and implementation that aligned with our unique culture. The climate assessment tool that InkDot developed for us surfaces rich insights into our employee’s experience. We have already committed to using the tool on a yearly basis allowing us to track progress of our company culture and take action based on what the team really thinks and feels. The strategy retreat was a space where each of us could contribute our perspective; the InkDot facilitators gently challenged us to think big and be ambitious, thereby creating pathways for the future that were truly co-created. Importantly, it gave us a sense of connection and alignment – while we can’t predict the future, having robust conversations about it has given us the confidence to move forward in a bold and synchronised way. At the end of this work, I really feel like we are having a common conversation as a leadership team, and as a company – and that we are ready to face the future.”

– Tatiana Pereira, Executive Catalyst