Repositioning organisations
Identifying the Transition Readiness of Organisations
People involved
Hannah Goss (me)
Nynke Tromp
Rick Schifferstein
FETE consortium
Project Output
Journal Paper
Conference Paper
When
During PhD
Challenge
Organisations are increasingly pressured to support sustainability goals, such as advancing energy transitions or reducing food waste. Achieving these goals requires navigating complex systems with interconnected stakeholders, competing priorities, and long-term objectives. A key challenge is assessing organisational readiness for new roles and identifying pathways to drive systemic change. In the food system, for example, stakeholders must balance values like food safety, sustainability, and consumer needs while transitioning to waste-reducing, resilient practices.
Existing methods, such as causal loop diagramming, help identify what can change but often fall short in showing how to achieve desired outcomes through innovation. They also lack the human-centred perspective needed to connect systemic changes with the values and behaviours of people in their daily lives. This makes it difficult to use these existing methods as way to analyse a system and bridge innovation opportunities.
This raises critical questions: How can organisations effectively assess their readiness for transitions? What tools can support designing solutions that align organisational efforts with both current realities and future system dynamics?
Approach
Research-through-design
Workshops
Organisational (re)positioning
System analysis
I conducted five different sessions ranging from single workshops (2 to 6 hours) to multi-day sessions to develop a new design tool to assess the readiness of organisations to transition. Participants included bachelor design students, design researchers and practitioners, and food system stakeholders, with group sizes varying between 6 and 60 people.
Each session explored different ways to reframe organisations, both within their immediate network and the broader system they are part of. I tailored the activities to suit the participants’ backgrounds and expertise. The variety of contexts and participants uncovered key challenges in reframing and positioning organisations within transition design. While all sessions focused on the Dutch food system’s shift towards reducing waste and ensuring enough food for all, the tool shows potential for use in other transitions and systemic challenges.
Outcomes
Transition Readiness Profiles
Design tool
I created the Transition Readiness Profiles (TRPs) as a practical tool to assess and discuss an organisation's readiness to engage in systemic change. Each TRP focuses on three key areas:
Position: Evaluates the organisation’s current role and influence within the system by examining its activities, behavioural impact, and core values. This helps to gauge how aligned they are with transition goals and what might be at stake for them.
Adaptability: Assesses the organisation’s capacity for innovation by looking at resources, strategic relationships, and past achievements. This reveals how easily they might adapt or innovate to support the transition.
Direction: Identifies barriers to change and measures how closely the organisation aligns with future pathways envisioned for the system.
The TRPs encouraged a possibility-oriented mindset that enabled both designers and stakeholders to envision current roles in new ways and align joint efforts with systemic goals. They enabled stakeholders to identify barriers, opportunities, and strategic pathways for innovation by relating to their wider business context and concerns, while speculating on new roles in the transition.
The TRPs’ simple, single-page format made them easy to share, compare, and refine during both individual and group discussions. At Dutch Design Week 2024, the tool received positive feedback from food system stakeholders, many of whom expressed interest in applying it to their own projects to better understand system dynamics and reposition collaborating stakeholders.