EPA Sustainable Materials Management

Problem

EPA SMM is the government entity responsible for creating a systemic approach to using materials. SMM wanted to convene a group of stakeholders around the issue of electronics recycling—an incredibly contentious group of stakeholders with vastly different interests, conflicting and competing historically for years.

Opportunity

I was brought in to design and facilitate a session that allowed this group to advance the conversation meaningfully, without getting bogged down in old issues or overwhelmed by the complexity.

Approach

After interviewing the stakeholders to understand better what the key issues were, we discovered that what was needed was a way of ensuring the interests of the different stakeholders were adequately and fairly represented throughout the discussion.

We decided to create a simple graphic overview to guide the conversation, in which each player was represented. We then broke the discussion down into three phases (orange, blue and green in the graphic below), to manage the topic. We printed the graphic out on large placemats, and designed an interactive session to draw out the core issues for each phase of the lifecycle.

Outcome

The session feedback was overwhelmingly positive, with many participants claiming it was the first productive conversation on this topic they’d ever had.