When you bring a brain trust of women from across the renewable-energy ecosystem together and give them a container to explore real challenges, something meaningful happens. True connection forms. New understandings surface. Collective wisdom strengthens. And fresh ways of thinking begin to illuminate our possible future.

That’s exactly what unfolded at the recent WRISE Bay Area Future-Fit Teams workshop, the kickoff to a new professional development series created to help our industry lead with purpose, clarity, and grounded collaboration. Nearly thirty women gathered on the Wednesday after Thanksgiving to look honestly at the realities facing teams right now and to imagine, together, what becomes possible when we lead from a future-back, purpose-driven perspective.

What emerged was generous, practical, and hopeful: shared challenges named aloud, tools to help teams adapt and align, and a renewed sense of confidence that, even in a turbulent time, we can strengthen how we work, support one another, and shape the future we’re here to build.

Deep gratitude to Generate Capital, our hosting sponsor and the physical home of this workshop series. We were also joined by representatives of Farella Braun + Martel, the sponsor of this first session.

Leading Future-Fit Teams Workshop Objectives

We centered the session around three goals:

• Identifying challenges to future-fit team execution
• Exploring tools and crowdsource solutions to those challenges
• Empowering each other to lead purpose-driven and impactful teams

To bring those objectives to life, we moved through three rounds of context-setting, small-group ideation, and collective sharing, allowing the room’s wisdom to guide the solutions that emerged. This format gave participants a chance to get to know each other and brainstorm together.

Round 1 – Challenges to Being a Future-Fit Team

We began with a shared definition. Drawing on the work of Dr. Peter Hawkins, one of the world’s leading thinkers in organizational and team coaching, we used an adapted understanding of a future-fit team:

A future-fit team is a collective that leads with shared purpose, thinks systemically, adapts continuously, cultivates deep relational trust, and creates meaningful value for the wider ecosystem it serves. It is a team that practices future-back strategic foresight, brings that vision into near-term innovation, and delivers on today’s priorities with clarity and discipline.

To understand how we can bring a future mindset into team activities, we introduced Bill Sharpe’s Three Horizons model, a powerful lens for understanding how teams balance present realities with emerging futures.

Working in a 1 → 3 → 2 sequence helps teams envision their long-term impact (Horizon 3), identify “business as usual” patterns (Horizon 1), and innovate strategically to bridge the gap (Horizon 2). Without this exploration, a team “is trying to innovate tomorrow out of the frame of yesterday’s mindset and assumptions.”

Each table identified their top three challenges to building a future-fit team.

When we synthesized them, the challenges could be categorized under three main headings:

Motivation

• Maintaining team motivation and confidence amid challenging market, economic and political dynamics
• Inspiring colleagues
• Lack of bandwidth

Culture

• Generational gaps
• Shared values
• Cross-functional Sustainability approach
• Mutual respect and shared responsibility among teams, understanding each other
• How do we build a culture of collectivism instead of individualism and encourage working towards the good of the group or company?

Fear

• Risk aversion/fear
• AI
• How to make bold/unpopular decisions
• Confidence to self-educate and share during uncertain times
• Lack of a North Star and executive churn
• Reticence to changing work methodology (fixed mindset)

Naming these challenges aloud created a foundation of honesty and an acknowledgment of the real conditions we are navigating.

Round 2 – Using Team Purpose to Solve Future-Fit Challenges

We then centered the session on purpose, the anchor and accelerant of future-fit teams.

To clarify a common confusion between mission, vision and purpose, we used Dr. Hawkins’ 21st-century definition:

Mission captures ambition. Vision shows what it looks like when success is achieved.
Purpose defines who the team serves and the value it creates for them.

Mission and vision are internally fueled. They reflect the ambitions of an individual, leader or company prioritizing their aims over all else. 

Purpose is relational and systemic. Purpose helps us to understand the impact of our actions on others and the wider ecosystem. 

In this era marked by complexity, interdependence, and rapid change, purpose becomes a stabilizing force that keeps teams aligned, courageous, and focused on impact.

To encourage future-fit thinking, a team must deeply understand and act from their purpose. To be purpose driven is the opportunity to prioritize the needs of current and future stakeholders in our activities. 

The most effective teams don’t just execute tasks; they understand why they exist within the system around them, who all their stakeholders are and how they serve them.

We explored how purpose:

• Creates the team (not the other way around)
• Connects the team through shared meaning
• Focuses the team on the needs of the organization, its stakeholders, and the future contribution they aim to fulfill

From there, table groups selected challenges to solve using team purpose as a lever. Solutions clustered into three areas: 

Communicating Across Functions

• Messaging about purpose and tying proposed programs directly to purpose
• Reframing and redefining the risk
• Mitigating risk in light of purpose to reduce fear
• Setting a deadline (with interim milestones)
• Right-timing the future state to strategically leverage stakeholders to set expectations consistent with purpose

Creating a Simple, Clear Purpose

• Asking the hard questions on behalf of the team
• Understanding purpose to empower team members and give them discretion
• Connecting to reality and to facts to respond to fear
• Aligning team purpose and impact with company purpose

Leading and Managing by Example

• Leading and teaching how to manage up
• Hosting cross-functional team lunch and learns for professional development and cross-team understanding
• Showing the impact to motivate
• Balancing a growth mindset with streamlined decision making
• Balancing individual contributor (IC) contributions with high-level strategy
• Sharing passions to help protect community and promote sustainability
• Checking in and adjusting throughout the project lifecycle
• Embracing being a “blocker” when it matters

Purpose became not just a concept, but a practical tool the group could use to navigate complexity and empower one another.

Round 3 – Bringing Stakeholder Views into Future-Fit Solutions

Finally, we explored a foundational component of systemic team coaching: stakeholders, those the team serves and influences, both inside and outside the organization.

Drawing on the framework developed by Hawkins’ firm, Renewal Associates, we looked at six typical stakeholder groups, plus two types not normally taken into account:

7th Generation

• Invites teams to stretch their time horizon outward
• If someone seven generations in the future looked back, what impact would they see? What impact does the team want them to see?

The 13th Fairy

Originating from the Sleeping Beauty story, the 13th Fairy symbolizes the excluded or forgotten stakeholder, the overlooked voice that can create risk later if not acknowledged now.

This sparked deep conversation. Identifying who we forget helps teams:

• Anticipate future risks
• Strengthen inclusion
• Broaden perspective
• Reduce blind spots

Considering the needs of the 13th Fairy in advance is to think about who you forgot. Who did not get the invitation? Who could feel left out of your plans? Who, particularly in view of the future you envision, is going to be important to consider? Who or what can come back and cause risk to your plans? Working from this perspective can help your team mitigate future risk by addressing the risk now or at least work toward addressing it.

For the final round, participants selected challenges again, this time solving them through stakeholder lenses.

Solutions included:

General Stakeholder Insights

• Reverse-engineer purpose from the primary stakeholder
• Link team and company purpose to stakeholder relationships

Specific Stakeholder Perspectives

• Demystify failure for sake of progress for 7th generation
• Adapt and be flexible because there’s always the 13th Fairy
• AI can identify stakeholders, but 13th Fairy needs human touch
• Take approach that all parties are allies to tackle culture challenge, and that external funders and investors are partners.
• Question assumptions. What if what you think is true is really the opposite?

This round brought forward some of the most creative and far-reaching ideas of the day.

Closing Reflections

Workshops like this require significant preparation and presence. I’m delighted to share we moved through all three rounds within our 90-minute window while maintaining depth and connection.

In this inaugural session of the Co-Creating the Future: Purposeful Leadership in Action series, we:

• Identified the top challenges building future-fit teams
• Explored tools and practical solutions
• Empowered one another to lead with greater clarity and impact

It was an energizing beginning for what promises to be a transformative series.

Deep appreciation to the San Francisco Bay Area Chapter of Women of Renewable Industries and Sustainable Energy (WRISE) board and members, to Generate Capital for giving the series a physical home, and to Farella Braun + Martel LLP for sponsoring this round.

Next Up – January 15, 2026 – Workshop 2 in this 3-Part Series

If you’re leading a team, or are part of one navigating change, join me as I facilitate this in-person workshop, presented by the WRISE San Francisco Bay Area chapter.

Ready to Bring This to Your Organization?

If your team is navigating transformation, new mandates, or cultural renewal, I can help.
Through Systemic Team Coaching and the Purpose Activation Pathway, we can co-create the conditions for your team to become truly future fit.

Let’s Start with a Discovery Conversation.
Reach out at Glenna (@) PermissiontoBloom.com or conveniently book a time here, to explore how your team can move from “business as usual” to purpose-activated performance.

*Systemic Team Coaching® is a registered trademark of Renewal Associates. I am a certified coach in their process.