Setting the scene for OG’s future at our second-ever strategy day

26 Jun

Last month, the Opportunity Green team took a day away from screens to think about the big picture for our 2024 Strategy Day, hosted by the fantastic Blue Crab Strategies. It was a day to think about how we’ve grown and had impact in the past year, what our priorities are going forward and what we need to do to achieve them.

Our first strategy day was held in April 2023 and the first thing that stood out was the sheer number of us. Last year we were a team of 10 – this year we are 17 and growing! Having more people in the room gave our discussions a greater depth of perspectives throughout the day, and it was especially interesting to hear from our more recent joiners.

All our teams have expanded in the past year, and we have also created a brand new operations team, with our COO Gill and our People & Culture Manager, Zuzka. In our legal team, we’ve welcomed Olivia, our new Legal Assistant, Dominika, our Legal Officer and Kirsty, our Legal Manager. Policy Assistant Aqila has joined the international shipping policy team and Digital Communications Assistant Daniel has joined the communications team. We have also expanded the SASHA team, with an EU Policy and Coalition Consultant, Martijn, who is based in Brussels. See our full team here.

Looking ahead to the next two years

Our CEO Aoife kicked the day off with some positive reflection on the impact we’ve had so far, noting how proud she is about being selected as one of Giving Green’s top recommendations for 2023 and with how we have developed our branding and our approach to diversity, equality and inclusion (DEI).

But the focus was mainly on looking forward, not back. “I want Opportunity Green to be a place of ideas and dreaming big about what we can achieve, that’s when we can have real impact,” she said.

As a fast-growing team, we talk a lot about how we can make sure we keep our unique working culture as we expand, and this was a hot topic for discussion throughout the day. We spoke about how to ensure that our growth is sustainable and well supported, and also agreed on the key priorities to pursue in the next two years. These are:

Economic perspective – Expand our impact to ensure we focus on climate justice and expand our team to include economists to help develop expertise in this area.
Media visibility – Position OG as leaders in the climate space, across sectors, by raising awareness through increased mainstream media presence and higher profile cases.
Specific impact – Influencing policy to the point where we can pinpoint our connection to policy changes.
Operations and culture – Ensuring our operations team is properly resourced and developing strong management and leadership to preserve our unique culture.

The day was facilitated by Priya and Julia at Blue Crab Strategies, who guided us through with a good balance of different activities to keep us engaged and motivated (with plenty of obligatory sticky notes along the way!) As we split up into smaller teams to delve deeper into OG’s internal processes, we discussed what kind of best practices we could follow to enable those priorities.

Our takeaways from the day

Needless to say, we’ve come away with lots of things to think about and actions to take forward and we’re super excited about our future. Here are some of our key takeaways:

Develop cross-team collaboration – A major recurring theme was the desire for increased collaboration across teams, by connecting our policy and legal work and looking for ways to embed our themes horizontally across the organisation, not just vertically.
Introduce the right systems at the right time – The team agreed on avoiding “admin for admin’s sake” and on the need for maintaining a human touch within HR, but we also acknowledged a need to put systems and structures in place to support our growing organisation as new hires are brought on.
Continue with strategic hiring – There is a shared excitement about the organisation’s ongoing growth, with a strong focus around hiring for “depth and breadth of expertise” to help retain OG’s reputation as a team of experts.

And the final word on the day goes to our CEO Aoife:

"Opportunity Green's strategy day gave the whole team the chance to take a step back from our day to day and really focus on where we are going over the next few years. I certainly came away from it energised and full of new ideas and I think the whole team did too. Now we'll be moving forward with putting those plans into action!"

Find out more about our different workstreams, including our legal work, our work advocating for a just transition in international shipping’s decarbonisation and our work bringing together companies from the shipping and aviation sectors through the SASHA Coalition.