Over the 23/24 September, Wendy McGuinness and Diane White attended a strategy mapping event at Kristin School, Auckland. Kristin is an independent co-educational school of approximately 2020 students ranging from Kindergarten to Year 13. The event was organised by Christian Silver, a Year 10 student who attended the Sustainable Future Institute’s StrategyNZ: Mapping our Future event in March 2020 as part of his school’s robotics team. After StrategyNZ, Christian decided to replicate the process for his school over a two-day event. The goal was to get a group of fellow students together to map strategies for Kristin in the year 2021.

The group of over 40 students, closely following the strategy mapping process set out at StrategyNZ, formed eight groups that represented students from Year 7-11. Wendy opened the event with a presentation on future-thinking and strategy mapping. The teams worked tirelessly over the two days, creating seven impressive and unique mission statements, strategy maps and school magazine covers. These were presented on Saturday afternoon, with Wendy acting as one of the three judges who awarded prizes to participants. Two strategy maps were selected to present to the school’s Board of Governors at their next meeting.

Both Wendy and Diane were honoured to attend the event and both came away feeling inspired by the foresight and future-thinking skills of this very talented group of young students. The feedback from the participants has been overwhelmingly positive and we have subsequently launched a competition for all school students to submit a strategy map of New Zealand for the year 2058. The Institute also aims to be involved in future strategy mapping exercises at other schools around New Zealand and will look to work closely with the students involved in the Kristin exercise. We also plan to take the key themes from the students’ presentations and write a piece on ‘What Learners Like’. Wendy’s presentation from the event can be found here.