Sector Scan from the eyes of a Business Consultant

Barry Ogilvie is a Chartered Accountant (when he is not offshore yacht racing) with a Graduate Certificate in Marketing (Wintec) and a Post Graduate Diploma in Innovation and Entrepreneurship (Waikato). Barry has held senior strategic and business development roles in both the public and private sectors and has a deep commitment to lifelong learning. In his capacity as Executive Dean at MIT, Barry worked closely with the Applied Sport and Recreation team to build the programme pathways for outdoor leadership professionals.

Business and Programme Development Workshop At 2018 Outdoors Forum Report by Barry Ogilvie

I was very fortunate to be asked to support a workshop at the recent outdoors forum held by the NZ Recreation Association. The workshop was attended by around 40 highly engaged and energised leaders of the outdoors recreation sector. I took the opportunity to look at the sector from a system thinking perspective to help identify the characteristics of both the desired and undesired states and to start the conversation on what causal loops (vicious and virtuous) are at play.


As anticipated it was easier for attendees to identify the threats to their sector but less intuitive to describe the desired future state. The session provided useful insights into how the sector might want to concentrate on describing that future state with more clarity and to implement messaging and feedback systems to drive toward that change. Some of the messaging included stronger links with Government and media, including determining how to implement a national strategy situated around the provincial growth fund.

The second element of the workshop then focussed on the three horizons growth model. It was a natural extension of the systems thinking conversation as there was unanimous agreement that the desired future state for the sector was located around growth.


We worked through the 3 horizons at an organisation level and then aggregated the results. Given the time limitations it was not a particularly scientific piece of research but the outcomes did suggest that there are challenges in all 3 horizons for many of the attendees:

• (H1) insufficient operating surpluses

• (H2) not enough genuine opportunities being developed to take to scale

• (H3) not enough focus on innovation processes that help accelerate the right new ideas toward reality

It was a rewarding and enjoyable session for me and I hope the attendees found it to be so for them as well.

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