Inspiring a housing association

No organisation operates in isolation and many of the burning issues are being solved elsewhere. To inspire the housing association with “the art of the possible” we organised several workshops with the leadership team to show them the innovation coming out of technology and startup spaces.

What we did

Flowchart titled 'Becoming a Customer' outlining steps for customer awareness, application, checks, onboarding, and involvement of staff, third parties, and parties like banks and legal authorities in the real estate and mortgage process.

Journey mapping

There is a kind of magic that happens when you get members from diverse teams together in a room to map out the experience journey - suddenly, silos break down and collaboration truly begins. To help the organisation understand their journey and where their digital transformation is currently focused, we carried out a mapping exercise.

This helped:

  • Identify conflicting priorities within the organisation

  • Showcase overlap of projects

  • Identify key focus areas

A group of people sitting around a conference table in a meeting room, listening to a woman speak.

Innovation safari

To explore how similar problems were being solved elsewhere, we took the team away for an innovation safari where we facilitated talks from several prominent speakers covering both the functional and inspirational aspects, followed by a discussion on how to apply this new knowledge to Stonewater’s own processes.

Topics covered included:

  • Agile principles demystified

  • Data analysis for customer journey modelling at scale

  • Practical blockchain applications in real estate

  • Lessons learned from major digital transformation projects

Construction workers wearing safety gear are building a small wooden house on city street, with brick buildings and trees in background.

Trends exploration

Trends tend to be palpable about 5-10 years before they become mainstream. To ensure the company was prepared for what was on the horizon, we organised a day of trends exploration with the wider leadership team.

We covered:

  • Different models of living

  • Smart buildings

  • Internet of Things & AI

  • Lateral partnerships

  • On-demand economy

Collage of news articles discussing organizational thoughts on remote work, including BP's flexible work policies, Google's remote work reopening, PwC allowing work from home, and banks adapting to new normal work arrangements.

Deep dive - hybrid working & blockchain

In a post-pandemic world, hybrid working was starting to become the new norm. To understand how to best implement this, we organised two speakers to share their experiences - a tech leader who had been working in this manner for decades and a senior people director of another housing group.

We also heard from a pioneer in the distributed ledgers/ blockchain space who gave us an overview of how these work and how they could be applied to this organisation.

A digital 3D wireframe representation of a cityscape with tall buildings on a black background, glowing with neon blue and green lines.

Going deeper into tech

Peering slightly further into the future, the next session covered:

  • Predictive maintenance

  • Servitisation and new business models enabled by technology