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Through this activity, you'll be able to deliver a workshop with your team and peers, but also involve some of your industry's stakeholders to gather a deeper and better understanding of the destination's needs when looking at sustainability collectively.

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The approximate duration of the activity should be of around 1 hour in total, with each of the three sub-section needing around 20 minutes.

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1. Shape a Vision With Your Team

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In this part of the activity, the focus will be on shaping a vision together with your team to really uncover how to best develop your sustainable strategy.

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First, your team should work on identifying the values that you believe are most important in your team and in your DMO, as these will play a key role in the strategy you will develop. Nonetheless, take time to also reflect on the values that you believe are important for your destination's stakeholders and industry, as a successful strategy needs to be in line with everyone's values to gain support and attract attention.

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Then, focus on framing your DMO's mission. Truly understanding why your DMO is relevant in the destination and the value that it can bring to all the destination's stakeholders by developing a sustainable strategy will be key to defining the commitments that you can take to lead the sustainable development of the destination.

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Finally, work with your team to frame your DMO's future vision. Focus on what you would like the organisation and the destination to be like in the future by means of establishing goals and a direction for the development of the sustainable strategy.

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2. 'As Is' and 'To Be' Scenarios

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Through this exercise, we will help you define how your organisation can mediate the stakeholder's positive and negative feelings through the development of your sustainable strategy. Thus, you should think of who you're doing this for and who are the stakeholders being affected by the sustainability challenges, as well as how they are being impacted by them. That is why we recommend that you seek the participation of different stakeholders for this sub-exercise, as it will allow you to gather perspectives that are closer to reality.

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The first part of the exercise will require you to put yourself in the shoes of your stakeholders and try to uncover what they do, think and feel in regards to sustainability. The objective is to then cluster those ideas that are similar and try to depict the phases that the destination's stakeholders go through when thinking, planning or considering sustainability.

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Once your team has completed the previous tasks, it is time to identify the areas which can result particularly positive or negative for the stakeholders. This will serve as a starting point to understand where they stand and how we could help them through our strategy.

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3. Align the Team

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With the last sub-exercise, the objective is to start taking steps towards shaping collective ideas to align the team in deciding how to develop the sustainable strategy and what the goals of this one should be.

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In the first part of the activity, your team will have to raise awareness of the needed skills to lead sustainability by examining which ones are present in the team and how developed they are. This will serve as a reality check to see what the team can excel at but also what could and should be improved or worked on. Once you have done this, ideate on some of the incredible outcomes you would like to achieve through your new sustainable strategy and write them down.

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Then, discuss which outcomes seem most important and impactful for the destination and its stakeholders, and vote on your favourite ones. This will allow you to align everyone in the team and, in the end, establish the agreements you have reached on the development of the sustainability strategy and the future development of the destination.

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If you are ready and want to get hands-on with the activity, you can download the template below.