A 100-year-old industry. A two-year conversation. One leadership team that changed how it saw the future.

A major UK social housing provider was mid-transformation and on track. But the CEO had a harder question: was the organisation being ambitious enough about what came next?

We designed and ran a three-year strategic foresight programme with the Senior Leadership Team, combining a full service blueprint with annual sessions that brought outside thinking into the room. The result was a leadership team that permanently changed how it saw its future.

What felt ambitious in 2018 became table stakes by 2022. This organisation was already there.

100:1

cost ratio between traditional and digital tenant contact - closed by the blueprint

48%

higher revenue growth in organisations with digitally literate senior leadership teams — MIT CISR

46%

of housing association leaders named cost-cutting as their main digital goal in 2018. This organisation was already looking beyond it.

4 years

ahead of the sector.  By 2022, nearly half of housing association leaders still lacked data quality for effective strategic decisions.

The brief

The organisation had just emerged from a major merger. A digitisation programme was underway and going well. They weren’t in trouble. That was almost the problem. But the CEO recognised something harder to name: the leadership team were solving for today's problems while the world around them was shifting in ways that demanded a fundamentally different kind of thinking.

The brief wasn't to run a workshop. It wasn't to produce a strategy. It was to change how a senior leadership team thought about the future, and to do it in a way that felt earned rather than imposed.

The questions on the table weren't operational. They were existential:

  • Are we a housing provider, or the builder of communities?

  • Are we customer-centric, innovation-driven, or cost-driven?

  • How do we make ourselves sustainable for the next decade?

Regulated organisations with social purpose can't pivot on instinct. Every idea has to survive contact with mission, compliance and community. The challenge was to open up the thinking without leaving the team unmoored.

  • Full lifecycle mapping across customer, staff and systems, revealing three duplicated transformation workstreams

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  • Annual external perspectives on AI, blockchain and experience design with the Senior Leadership Team

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  • Fully-formed proposition, service blueprint & business model

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  • The concept was presented to the board. Rather than building an internal competitor, the company embedded the strategic thinking directly into their core offering.

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process & OUTCOMEs

The approach

Phase 1: Service blueprint

We started in March 2018 with a scoping and research phase, followed by two away days with the Senior Leadership Team.

The first day focused around a full service blueprint, built collaboratively in the room. It made complexity legible. And it immediately revealed that three major transformation projects were targeting the same stage of the customer journey, thereby duplicating effort while other areas went untouched.

That single finding changed the conversation from "how do we deliver this?" to "are we pointed at the right things?"

Phase 2: Look outside the sector

Senior stakeholders. A blank piece of paper. No sacred cows.

Ideas explored included:

  • Smart city data partnerships

  • Nano-chip pest tracking

  • Consultancy for urban regeneration projects

  • Blockchain-enabled smart contracts

  • On-demand service platforms

All ideas were mapped on an impact/feasibility matrix.

Two strategic themes emerged:

  1. Large scale connectedness: IoT, data and smart infrastructure operating at city scale

  2. Personal-level service: on-demand platforms and messaging tools transforming customer experience

Phase 3: Concept sprint

The workshop thinking was synthesised into a fully-formed startup concept designed to connect local pest technicians with customers the way Uber connects drivers with passengers.

The problems it solved:

  • No fast way to book same-day pest control

  • Inconsistent quality between local providers

  • Patchy DIY product support

  • Opaque pricing

The proposition:

  • On-demand same-day booking

  • Tiered subscription model for ongoing prevention

  • Premium video pest identification and advice

  • DIY product support

  • Free services for community and social organisations

The blueprint: A five-layer service blueprint that mapped everything: customer discovery, chatbot-assisted diagnosis, technician dispatch, service delivery and post-visit follow-up alongside the full technician onboarding journey and technology stack.

The outcome

The concept was presented to the board. Rather than building an internal competitor, the company embedded the strategic thinking directly into their core offering.

What followed validated every major call the project made.

What’s more, team members that worked on this project gained valuable experience in innovative thinking and a fresh perspective which had a lasting impact on the organisation.

What we identified

  • Service disruption opportunity

  • Connected device potential

  • Omnichannel customer experience

  • Chatbot and messaging integration

  • AI and predictive pest control

What they did

  • Launched on-demand digital services

  • Grew network to 500,000 devices

  • Rolled out across 18 countries

  • WhatsApp, chatbot and CRM deployed

  • Launched AI-based pest control services

“Innovation in pest control is still very product and device-driven - leaving a huge opportunity for market disruption from the service side.”

— From the original research, August 2017. We weren't wrong.