Highlands Tourism Partnership workshop united stakeholders to create a vision for sustainable tourism, balancing visitor experience with community needs.
Recognising the need for a fresh, innovative approach to address the complex challenges and opportunities facing tourism in the Scottish Highlands, the Highlands Tourism Partnership (HTP) - coordinated by Highlands and Islands Enterprise and the Highlands Council - invited us to Inverness to facilitate a dynamic one-day strategy workshop. This session, on 12 September, brought together a diverse group of stakeholders – destinations, private sector businesses, community organisations and local government representatives from across the region – to collaborate and co-create a unified vision for tourism development. Through careful design and external moderation, this workshop began by building empathy and defining the main challenges faced by the destination to create alignment between all stakeholders and eliminate existing friction points before the in-depth exploration of potential solutions and their implications.
To determine the appropriate strategic direction, the workshop began by reflecting upon the current tourism landscape in the Highlands. Participants identified key challenges facing the destination, such as workforce and housing shortages, visitor management concerns, infrastructure limitations, competing priorities and the need for greater stakeholder collaboration. They also recognised the region's significant strengths, including its iconic brand and reputation, stunning natural beauty and the expertise and vision of its people. This led to an insightful SWOT analysis, highlighting weaknesses like resource constraints, fragmentation and capacity issues, but also outlining opportunities for sustainable tourism development, data-driven decision-making and innovative funding mechanisms. Through the DTTT's "Parking Lot" format, participants were also encouraged to share their frustrations about complex challenges while creating a framework where these do not overwhelm the creative process and prevent the discussions from deviating to tackling highly specific issues. This approach helped delineate clear areas of commonality and the hurdles that need to be overcome through coordinated action.
Mapping user needs was a critical exercise to complement this analysis. We collectively identified five primary user groups and carefully considered their respective daily activities, struggles and expectations, revealing key insights and strategic implications:
These insights underscored the importance of strategic resource allocation, enhancing the visitor experience, ensuring workforce stability, finding a balance between community needs and visitor demands and incorporating environmental considerations into future tourism development plans.
With this contextualisation, we shifted our focus to visualising the ideal future state of tourism in the Highlands. Through a series of interactive exercises, participants explored the desired scenarios for each stakeholder group. For visitors, this means authentic experiences, easy access to services and a genuine sense of welcome. For local communities, it means tangible benefits from tourism, a voice in its ongoing development and an overall enhancement of their quality of life. Businesses desire sustainable models, a clear understanding of visitor expectations and effective collaboration with communities. Similarly, DMOs strive for a clear role that delivers value for the local economy and builds positive and proactive relationships with communities. For the public sector, this means adequate funding and strategic efforts to achieve balanced economic growth, community wellbeing and environmental sustainability. Ultimately, this collaborative process resulted in a shared vision: a sustainable system where visitors, locals, businesses and nature thrive in harmony.
To bring this vision to life, we collectively defined five key strategic outcomes:
To help visualise this future, participants crafted bold news headlines, reflecting what the successful realisation of these strategic outcomes looks like in practice. This process emphasised the necessary steps to achieve these ambitions and identified the enablers for their successful achievement. These included ensuring strong collaboration and respecting diverse voices, reducing tourism's environmental footprint, investing in infrastructure and skills development and leveraging the endless possibilities brought by technology.
The final stage of the strategic design sprint involved a rapid brainstorming session where participants unleashed their creativity to generate bold ideas. Employing both rapid ideation and absurd ideation techniques, the session pushed the boundaries of conventional thinking, leading to a wealth of pragmatic, creative and innovative solutions that sparked further exploration. These ideas centred around four key themes that emphasise the need for sustainable practices, innovative solutions and a commitment to positioning the Highlands as a leader in responsible tourism:
The design sprint concluded with a set of strategic recommendations to guide the future of tourism development in the Highlands. These encompassed sustainable infrastructure development, smart visitor management, community-centric tourism models, a focus on high-value, year-round tourism, sustainability leadership, collaborative governance, workforce development and digital transformation. An implementation roadmap, outlining a phased approach to bringing these recommendations to fruition provided a clear path for transforming the ideas into tangible actions, ensuring that the energy and enthusiasm generated during the design sprint translate into real-world impact, both in the short-term and preparing for long-term growth over the next decade.
Synthesising vast quantities of ideas from our facilitation of this intensive one-day process enabled critical reflection and analysis. These extensive outputs empowered us to incorporate local considerations into a strategic plan built upon a shared vision, shaping a cohesive roadmap for long-term cooperation in the Highlands tourism sector. At the same time, the collaborative nature of the design sprint also restored mutual trust and respect between key stakeholders, enhancing relationships and replacing the current fragmentation of tourism development in the region.
Recognising the need for a fresh, innovative approach to address the complex challenges and opportunities facing tourism in the Scottish Highlands, the Highlands Tourism Partnership (HTP) - coordinated by Highlands and Islands Enterprise and the Highlands Council - invited us to Inverness to facilitate a dynamic one-day strategy workshop. This session, on 12 September, brought together a diverse group of stakeholders – destinations, private sector businesses, community organisations and local government representatives from across the region – to collaborate and co-create a unified vision for tourism development. Through careful design and external moderation, this workshop began by building empathy and defining the main challenges faced by the destination to create alignment between all stakeholders and eliminate existing friction points before the in-depth exploration of potential solutions and their implications.
To determine the appropriate strategic direction, the workshop began by reflecting upon the current tourism landscape in the Highlands. Participants identified key challenges facing the destination, such as workforce and housing shortages, visitor management concerns, infrastructure limitations, competing priorities and the need for greater stakeholder collaboration. They also recognised the region's significant strengths, including its iconic brand and reputation, stunning natural beauty and the expertise and vision of its people. This led to an insightful SWOT analysis, highlighting weaknesses like resource constraints, fragmentation and capacity issues, but also outlining opportunities for sustainable tourism development, data-driven decision-making and innovative funding mechanisms. Through the DTTT's "Parking Lot" format, participants were also encouraged to share their frustrations about complex challenges while creating a framework where these do not overwhelm the creative process and prevent the discussions from deviating to tackling highly specific issues. This approach helped delineate clear areas of commonality and the hurdles that need to be overcome through coordinated action.
Mapping user needs was a critical exercise to complement this analysis. We collectively identified five primary user groups and carefully considered their respective daily activities, struggles and expectations, revealing key insights and strategic implications:
These insights underscored the importance of strategic resource allocation, enhancing the visitor experience, ensuring workforce stability, finding a balance between community needs and visitor demands and incorporating environmental considerations into future tourism development plans.
With this contextualisation, we shifted our focus to visualising the ideal future state of tourism in the Highlands. Through a series of interactive exercises, participants explored the desired scenarios for each stakeholder group. For visitors, this means authentic experiences, easy access to services and a genuine sense of welcome. For local communities, it means tangible benefits from tourism, a voice in its ongoing development and an overall enhancement of their quality of life. Businesses desire sustainable models, a clear understanding of visitor expectations and effective collaboration with communities. Similarly, DMOs strive for a clear role that delivers value for the local economy and builds positive and proactive relationships with communities. For the public sector, this means adequate funding and strategic efforts to achieve balanced economic growth, community wellbeing and environmental sustainability. Ultimately, this collaborative process resulted in a shared vision: a sustainable system where visitors, locals, businesses and nature thrive in harmony.
To bring this vision to life, we collectively defined five key strategic outcomes:
To help visualise this future, participants crafted bold news headlines, reflecting what the successful realisation of these strategic outcomes looks like in practice. This process emphasised the necessary steps to achieve these ambitions and identified the enablers for their successful achievement. These included ensuring strong collaboration and respecting diverse voices, reducing tourism's environmental footprint, investing in infrastructure and skills development and leveraging the endless possibilities brought by technology.
The final stage of the strategic design sprint involved a rapid brainstorming session where participants unleashed their creativity to generate bold ideas. Employing both rapid ideation and absurd ideation techniques, the session pushed the boundaries of conventional thinking, leading to a wealth of pragmatic, creative and innovative solutions that sparked further exploration. These ideas centred around four key themes that emphasise the need for sustainable practices, innovative solutions and a commitment to positioning the Highlands as a leader in responsible tourism:
The design sprint concluded with a set of strategic recommendations to guide the future of tourism development in the Highlands. These encompassed sustainable infrastructure development, smart visitor management, community-centric tourism models, a focus on high-value, year-round tourism, sustainability leadership, collaborative governance, workforce development and digital transformation. An implementation roadmap, outlining a phased approach to bringing these recommendations to fruition provided a clear path for transforming the ideas into tangible actions, ensuring that the energy and enthusiasm generated during the design sprint translate into real-world impact, both in the short-term and preparing for long-term growth over the next decade.
Synthesising vast quantities of ideas from our facilitation of this intensive one-day process enabled critical reflection and analysis. These extensive outputs empowered us to incorporate local considerations into a strategic plan built upon a shared vision, shaping a cohesive roadmap for long-term cooperation in the Highlands tourism sector. At the same time, the collaborative nature of the design sprint also restored mutual trust and respect between key stakeholders, enhancing relationships and replacing the current fragmentation of tourism development in the region.
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