Overalls to Lab Coats

by Matt Scott

Inspection practices used internationally by the red meat industry date back to the late 1800’s, which can constrain innovative thinking within historical boundaries. This paper documents the beginning of a transformative journey for meat inspectors in New Zealand, by applying Futures Thinking to stimulate collaborative innovation. Interactive workshops with meat inspectors triggered a paradigm shift, redirecting the focus from automating conventional inspection methods to exploring uncharted territories. This shift revealed new possibilities for meat inspectors, by reimagining their roles in possible futures scenarios dominated by non-meat alternative proteins, and with integrated data negating the need for post-mortem carcass inspections. This paper also demonstrates how Futures Thinking can be used to enhance stakeholder engagement and foster self-ownership, as meat inspectors redefined their own roadmap towards a secure and sustainable future: from overalls to lab coats; from meat inspectors to protein processing quality experts.

Figure 1: Historical innovations in meat inspection can be seen progressing through the decades, from top to bottom. Image credit: Will Petersen

Introduction

Post-mortem meat inspection in Aotearoa New Zealand is conducted on behalf of the New Zealand Government’s Ministry for Primary Industries by AsureQuality, a state-owned enterprise with the indigenous Māori title of Kaitiaki Kai, which translates to “guardians of food”. AsureQuality employs 1,800 people across the full length of New Zealand to provide independent, third-party food assurances across the value chain, through services in testing, inspection and certification. AsureQuality’s Meat Industry Services business unit employs 650 Meat Inspectors working in 68 meat processing plants throughout the country, inspecting 28 million carcasses per year to enable New Zealand’s $11bn red meat export industry, which forms the country’s second largest goods export sector and comprises 16% of total export revenue (Meat Industry Association of New Zealand, 2022).

The traditional organoleptic model used for meat inspection internationally has been largely unchanged since humans first began using their sight, smell and touch senses to harvest red meat, with few changes made since the model’s formal inception in New Zealand in 1898. The Slaughtering and Inspection Act of 1900 enabled the development of the New Zealand Meat Hygiene Service, which at the time led the world for food safety and innovation (Robinson, 2006, pp. 20).

Figure 2: Historical organoleptic meat inspection circa 1910, essentially unchanged today. Image credit: Weighing lamb and sheep carcasses at the Christchurch Meat Company. Webb, Steffano, 1880-1967: Collection of negatives. Ref: 1/1-019436-G. Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand. /records/22304784

While meat inspection has traditionally been driven by food safety concerns to manage risks to consumers’ health, it has been increasingly driven by requirements to access foreign export markets. In recent years as animal diseases progress along the pathway towards eradication, food assurances are moving from answering the old question “is this food safe for human consumption?”, to new questions such as, “does this food align with my values?”, and “is this food really what it claims to be?” These changes are cause for AsureQuality’s Meat Inspection Services to question how to best prepare for shifting consumer demands in the future, through their “Future of Meat Inspection” programme of work.

Objectives

This experiment aimed to trial Futures Thinking tools as a method for engaging with stakeholders about AsureQuality’s Future of Meat Inspection programme of work, and to test the value of wider stakeholder collaboration when exploring possible scenarios and defining courses of action to inform the strategic roadmap.

Methodology

Two Futures Thinking workshops were facilitated at AsureQuality’s annual Meat Inspection Plant Supervisors Face-to-Face conferences. The workshops were held for the North Island in Taupō on 14 June 2023 and for the South Island in Christchurch on 27 June 2023, with about 40 meat inspection plant supervisors, managers, and union delegates attending each event, seated with around 6 people per table.

The demographic composition of Plant Supervisors in terms of gender and age represents a higher proportion of females and young people compared to the broader workforce demographic for all meat inspectors, with workshop attendees being 59% male and 41% female.

Figure 3: Demographic makeup (age and sex) of AsureQuality’s Meat Inspector workforce

The run sheet for the two 1-hour workshops was arranged into five key activities:

1. Icebreaker – Future Vistas Shuffle (5 mins)

The workshops began with a physical activity inspired by futurist Fred Polak’s “Polak Game” (Hayward & Candy, 2017), Participants were asked to line up along the length of the room, to form an embodied spectrum from “the future is bright” at the front of the room, to “the future is bleak” at the back of the room. The facilitator asked for volunteers at different points along the spectrum to share their worldviews with the whole group. The exercise then added a second axis to the spectrum across the width of the room, from “I can influence the future” to “I have no control over the future”, with voluntary sharing of worldviews from participants positioned across the spectrum (Inayatullah, 2023).

Figure 4: Instruction slide for the icebreaker activity

This icebreaker activity effectively established a psychologically safe space for fostering creativity and encouraging the exploration of ideas. By reinforcing the underlying principles that no individual’s views about the future are right or wrong, and highlighting the value of diversity in perspectives and worldviews, it set the scene nicely for the activities to follow.

1. Warmup – Time Travel Throwback (5 mins)

The next activity asked groups seated at each table to think back 25 years and discuss what was different about the world in 1998 compared to 2023, then share back highlights to the wider group. The facilitator explained that for the upcoming activity, participants would be asked to think forward 25 years, so the purpose of this activity was to prepare with a relative sense of the time interval and the magnitude of change that could occur (Doig, 2023). The interval of 25 years was selected to align with some previous strategic roadmap work, which had marked milestones for the future in 100 years, 50 years, and 25 years.

Figure 5: The author facilitating the warmup activity in Christchurch Image credit: Daniel McGregor

The intention of this warmup activity was to set the tone with some light-hearted fun and to warmup participants with sharing their ideas, to make the upcoming activities more accessible.

1. Horizon Scanning – Emerging Signals of Change (10 mins)

Participants were then asked to brainstorm with their table groups any signals of change that might be emerging in the headlines today that could have an impact on meat inspection 25 years into the future in the year 2048. As table groups shared back their ideas, the facilitator grouped the emerging signals of change into similar themes on a whiteboard.

Table 1: Signals of change themes, identified by Meat Inspection Plant Supervisors

If more time was available, the groups would have then developed these signals into their own plausible scenarios for further exploration in the next activity. But due to the time limitation of the 1-hour workshops, the facilitator took a guess what key signals might emerge during this activity and brought some pre-prepared scenarios to expediate moving on to the next activity.

1. Exploring Scenarios – Headlines from 2048 (20 mins)

One plausible scenario was handed out to each table group, expressed as a headline from the year 2048.

Table 2: Scenario headlines allocated to groups, for exploration of possible futures

Each table group received an A3 sheet of paper with a different headline printed at the top, and a blank template beneath, divided into quadrants asking four questions:

1. What might be the impacts of this scenario, using a Political / Economic / Societal / Technological / Legal / Environmental (PESTLE) lens?
2. What risks or opportunities might this scenario present for meat inspectors?
3. In this scenario, what would be the preferred outcome for meat inspectors?
4. What actions could we be taking today to ensure meat inspectors achieve their preferred outcome in this scenario?

Figure 6: Example of the A3 worksheet template

1. Next Actions: Today’s Choices for Tomorrow’s Triumphs (10 mins)

The final activity asked each table to share back to the wider group a concise summary of their scenario worksheet, and as each group read out their next actions the facilitator collated into themes on a whiteboard. The workshop ended with a concise list of next actions generated by the Plant Supervisors to ensure AsureQuality’s meat inspectors get the future they want. The results from the workshop have been used to strengthen the robustness of AsureQuality’s Future of Meat Inspection strategic roadmap.

Findings

The first key learning through workshopping the Futures scenarios revealed that a previously formulated strategic roadmap for the Future of Meat Inspection had simply continued a “linear projection” (Dorr, as cited in Milojević, 2020) of the “Used Future” (Inayatullah, 2023), which had planned to automate the current manual process as it has been conducted for the past 125 years. Deeper exploration through scenarios during the workshops revealed that if data was able to be collected about an animal’s health while it was alive, post-mortem inspection of a carcass may not be required, which would render automation of the current inspection process redundant.

Secondly, by exploring the impact of alternative proteins on the role of meat inspectors, participants identified that meat inspectors need to prepare for a shift “from overalls to lab coats”, as the role transitions “from meat inspector to protein processing quality expert”. Meat inspectors were able to see a role for themselves in this future, and an opportunity for New Zealand to lead the world in supplying the best protein.

The final key learning was in the power of using Futures Thinking as a tool for enabling stakeholder engagement. Instead of strategic foresight being an activity confined to the like-minded few in the executive offices, democratising Futures literacy empowered stakeholders to participate in the strategic planning process by collaboratively authoring their preferred future, whilst simultaneously making the organisation’s strategic roadmap more robust.

Conclusion

This paper found that Futures Thinking can be a powerful tool for engaging stakeholders in programmes of transformational change and can result in improved outcomes for strategic planning. Futures Thinking tools empowered meat inspectors at AsureQuality in New Zealand to take ownership of their preferred future and tested the robustness of the strategic roadmap with diversified worldviews through the exploration of possible scenarios. The activities helped Meat Inspectors to see that there was a future that still included them, and that their jobs were not going to disappear, but might change. A key moment revealed that AsureQuality’s previous strategic roadmap for the Future of Meat Inspection had extended the known past into the future, rather than challenging potential disruptions that could make that scenario redundant. AsureQuality now intends to explore additional uses for Futures Thinking across it’s wider business in engaging stakeholders to empower collaborative, innovative transformation.

References

Doig, C. (2023). Futures Literacy meets ChatGPT 4 learning. CORE Education, Christchurch, New Zealand.

Hayward, P., & Candy, S. (2017). The Polak Game, or: Where do you stand?. Journal of Futures Studies, 22(2).

Inayatullah, S. (2023). Futures Thinking + Strategy Formation. The Piano Centre for Music and the Arts, Christchurch, New Zealand.

Meat Industry Association of New Zealand. (2022). Red Meat Sector Trade Summary. https://www.mia.co.nz/assets/Uploads/Overall-exports-factsheet-2022-final-version.pdf

Milojević, I. (2020). Futures Fallacies – Our Common Delusions When Thinking About the Future. Journal of Futures Studies. https://jfsdigital.org/2020/07/18/future_fallacies/

Robinson, D. (2006). No news is good news: A history of New Zealand’s Meat Hygiene Service. Steele Roberts: Wellington.

Author

Matt Scott | matt.scott@asurequality.com