Melissa Packham
Director, Wild-Built Consulting
Melissa Packham is a strategy consultant and communicator with over 20 years experience. With a background marketing iconic Fast Moving Consumer Goods brands (like Arnott's and Campbell's Soup) Melissa helps organisations become future-ready by ensuring strategies aren't built on fantasy, brands have purpose, and visions don't lack imagination.
Child’s Play: Why Imagination Is Your Competitive Advantage
What happens when you give thirty workshop participants a set of wicked problems, crayons, story prompts and take them 50 years into the future? That’s what we set out to discover in a workshop for Huon Valley Council, with an objective to create a desired future to guide adaptation planning.
We knew traditional scenario planning would yield the same, fear-driven ideas. Instead, we leveraged story and imagination to reveal tangible solutions and deep emotional resonance that allowed participants to see the challenges in a whole new light.
While consultants grapple with relevance as technology encroaches, our capacity for imagination and inherent wiring for story may be the advantage we’re looking for. And research backs this up: companies that leverage strategic imagination develop better plans for volatile times and shape the future itself in new and exciting ways.
The challenges clients face are complex, yet the risks are mostly knowable. But knowing and preparing are different beasts. When risks are interrelated like never before and disruption is the baseline, old frameworks won't cut the mustard.
So what if instead of simply envisioning scenarios, we inhabited them - activating our very human ability to experience what hasn't happened yet.
This session introduces a methodology that uses time-travelling storytelling - to help clients navigate what traditional planning can't. Drawing on the Council case study, you'll see how embodied, playful facilitation creates the psychological safety for bold conversations.
You'll leave with three questions to use with clients that reveal hidden assumptions about risk, legacy, and what 'success' means across generations.
AI can analyse historical patterns, but when the future will look nothing like the past, your clients need someone who can help them imagine and inhabit what's never existed.
Imagination isn't child’s play - it's how we’ll solve our most complex problems.
Brendan Reidy
Gilbert Kruidenier
Phil George
Carly Forrest
Jules Yim
Prof. David Snowden