Best Practice Fish Bowl

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Utilizing the “fish bowl” approach, select participants will sit within a circle and discuss procurement issues, while participants outside the circle take notes. After some time, the discussion will shift outward, giving those outside the circle an opportunity to add their perspective to the conversation.

Our “challenge” is to create a new procurement best practice that will help push the CCCs closer toward the statewide decarbonization goal. Sustainability managers, who will be placed “inside” the circle, will speak first on the procurement-related challenges they face in moving their organization toward decarbonization. The procurement agents, placed “outside” the circle, will speak second. As experts in their organizations’ procurement policies and processes, procurement agents will advise sustainability managers on how to approach their challenges. The conversation will flow between the groups on each side of the circle until a general consensus on next step actions is met.

As an alternative approach, if procurement agents face a problem related to tracking carbon reduction across the organization’s procurement, they may sit “inside” the circle, and the sustainability managers will sit outside in the adviser role.

The Empower Procurement team will moderate and take notes throughout the discussion.

To assist with the visual of a “circle” on the Zoom platform, we will give microphone and camera permissions to those speaking while also “pinning” their cameras, so that they remain on screen while they have the floor.