Bells's Ice Cream Simulation

On Week 3 each group was given a stimulation in order to exercise our integrative thinking as well as leave us better prepared for our final project. Our stimulation was called “Bellas Ice Cream Challenge” and to sum it up, our goal as a team was to find a solution where Bellas can continue to be a brand that makes the effort to be environmentally conscious while also maintaining financial stability. As well as forcing ourselves to use innovative and critical thinking in order to come up with a solution that does not involve compromise. The stimulation lasted about a week and a half and the process that this activity entailed was much more challenging and meticulous than we all expected.

We started off this challenge with a video where the CEO, Marketing Director, and Chief Financial Officer explained the situation from their point of view. We were then given the main tension within Bellas Ice Cream Company: should they choose to move further with their company that is facing the risk of bankruptcy by sticking to their good morals ad unique taste OR should they do a transition into a mainstream ice cream company and lose the essence of the company?

We started off with defining our opposing models: Just be Efficient and Maintain Status Quo. As a group, Libras Inc described both models with points on what an efficient ice cream company looks like to us, as well as what a Status Quo Ice cream company looks like to us whilst also brainstorming real-life ice cream companies that we felt outlined these two models. These points were of course accompanied by some subpar drawings.

Our next step was to identify the stakeholders of Bellas in order to complete our propro chart. A propro chart identifies the benefits of each model in regards to the various main stakeholders. As a class, we all agreed on the stakeholders being the company itself, employees and the consumers. We divided our benefit bubbles evenly amongst the group so that everyone can contribute their ideas to this activity. Creating reasons for why the status quo model benefits employees were most difficult for our group since we do not agree with the way big companies treat their employees as if they are disposable.

After completing the propro chart we created around 4 links that could possibly work together, aiming to at least achieve one link which crossed the efficiency and status quo borderline. Following that, as a group picked our favorite links AND top 3 benefits. This allowed us to define our goals and priorities when coming up with our new model in relations to Bella’s.

After doing this step we had to come up with one word to define each model, which would further help us to define our tension. This was pretty difficult since everyone has different views on what the core values/main essences of each model are making it a stressful task to successfully come to an agreement on our two final words; but eventually as a group we decided that “vanilla” was best for efficiency, and “morally intact” was great for status quo as well.

The last step in this challenge was to create a final sentence that posed the question of how we might combine a benefit and benefit, model and model, or benefit and model; although as a group we did decide to focus on a benefit & benefit final sentence. This, alongside summing up models into one word, was by far the most difficult thing we had to complete. The sentence was used as a gateway into brainstorming other, more beneficial models - which ideally is the whole “Integrative Thinking” part of it all. From this sentence, we came up with a variety of different idea’s, our best one (which was a synthesis of various other idea’s) being we transform Bella’s into a dine-in ice cream diner. Within the diner, we create a mascot or logo (we were thinking a feminized goat with big curly eyelashes) to make the brand recognizable. We sponsor known people and do a lot of social media outreach to get Bella’s known and do a lot more engaging activities such as having ‘mystery’ flavors where if you guess them you get a shoutout on their Instagram pictures! We, Libra’s, thought this was a great solution because it would reinvent the brand and create exposure, bringing a lot more audiences in whilst also keeping their morals and visions intact.

Overall, this stimulation was a very beneficial one. Everything we did throughout was an accurate representation of how we actually utilize the tools in order to get to the integrative thinking stage, something that we didn’t know how to do before. Now that we have some direction, our group can take some valuable skills and resources that were used in the Bellas stimulation activity and use them towards Tommy Thompson Park and solve their problem.