Everyone has the same tools.
Not everyone has the same thinking.
A proposal to build Solstice Energy's internal capability to frame problems well and solve them with AI — designed to outlast the tools it teaches.
Getting value from AI is not a tools problem.
Solstice Energy is a challenger brand in a market that rewards speed of thought. Expanding from gas into electricity, competing against incumbents with far deeper resources, means the quality and pace of your thinking is a genuine competitive asset. AI can multiply that asset — or it can quietly generate a great deal of confident, plausible, unusable work.
Opposite proposes a practical capability-building engagement that strengthens strategic thinking and AI fluency together, from within. Rather than delivering generic prompt training, the program helps your leaders understand where AI genuinely fits in your operating rhythm, apply structured thinking to live business problems, and leave with tools, prototypes and ways of working that are sustainable long after we've gone.
A challenger brand moving faster than its playbook.
Solstice has done the hard part. A rebrand into a distinctly Tasmanian energy business, an expansion into electricity, and a market position built on being more human than the alternative. What follows a move like that is a period where ambition runs ahead of process — where the strategy is understood by a handful of people, and everyone else is working hard on what's directly in front of them.
At the same time, AI has arrived in every team, unevenly. Some people are using it daily and getting real leverage. Others tried it once, were unimpressed, and moved on. Very few organisations have a shared view of what good looks like, where the risks actually sit, or which parts of the work are genuinely worth automating.
This project supports Solstice's leaders to strengthen their capability to think strategically and apply AI with judgement, and to leave participants with practical examples, tools and approaches they can use within Solstice's existing environment well beyond the project.
The opportunity is an internal capability to think well and build fast.
Solstice is seeking more than a better set of prompts. AI initiatives underperform not because the technology is wrong, but because nobody stopped to ask which problem was actually worth solving. These are the six questions we'd want answered before writing a single workshop slide.
A four-stage engagement, from readiness review to sustainable practice.
Hover or tap a stage to open it.
We establish a practical picture of how strategic decisions and day-to-day work currently happen across Solstice: what gets decided where, by whom, on what information, and with what constraints. This includes a desktop review of tools, data, governance and workflows, the opportunities and limits of AI in a regulated energy retail context, and twelve stakeholder interviews of forty-five minutes each.
This stage develops a shared set of practical thinking tools and AI methods that participants can use to sharpen how problems are framed, prioritised and solved. The workshops are hands-on and anchored in Solstice examples — your customers, your market, your operating constraints — rather than abstract instruction.
Capability becomes useful when it is applied to real work. Alongside the workshops, Opposite works with two to three nominated internal champions on live business opportunities, developing working solutions through iterative review and refinement. This stage turns theory into operational practice, while generating examples that can be reused internally.
The final stage consolidates what has been learned and translates it into a practical operating model that continues after the engagement. It focuses on refining reusable tools and templates, clarifying decision principles and guardrails, identifying governance improvements, supporting internal champions, and creating a pathway for continued uptake. The goal is to leave Solstice with a stronger internal capability, not a dependency on external support.
Three sessions. Three hours each. All of it on your own work.
Thinking Clearly Before You Prompt
- How strategic problems get mis-framed
- The problem-definition model
- Decision quality versus decision speed
- Where AI helps and where it flatters
- Common failure modes
- Live Solstice examples
Making AI Actually Useful
- Prompt architecture, not prompt tricks
- Context, constraints and evidence
- Building a reusable prompt library
- Tool landscape and fit-for-purpose choice
- Verification and the confidence trap
- Hands-on build exercises
Embedding & Governing the Practice
- Deployment into everyday workflow
- Stakeholder engagement and adoption
- Guardrails, privacy and customer trust
- Measuring whether it worked
- Governance and sustainability
Workshops can be delivered as three separate half-days or compressed into an intensive format across two days, depending on the availability of your leadership group.
Before we design the program, we'd map where capability sits today.
A working illustration of the Stage 01 output. Select the groups you'd want in scope and the profile rebuilds live. Every panel is resizable — drag the corner handle to reshape the board. Illustrative structure, not real Solstice data.
Three ways to engage, scaled to ambition and budget.
AI Foundations Masterclass
- Desktop review
- 8 stakeholder interviews
- AI readiness review
- Workshop 1
- Workshop 2
You want to raise the floor quickly across a leadership group, and you already know which problems you're solving.
Strategy & AI Capability Program
- Desktop review
- 12 stakeholder interviews
- AI readiness mapping
- Three workshops
- Pilot AI project
- Strategy & AI toolkit
You want the capability to stick. The pilot projects are what convert a good workshop into a changed way of working.
Strategic AI Operating System
- Everything in Option B
- Prompt & workflow templates
- AI use standards and guardrails
- Strategy playbook
- AI-enabled workflow design
- Leadership briefing & handover
You expect to scale the practice across the whole business and need the governance scaffolding in place before you do.
Pricing basis: indicative investment calculated at Opposite's standard consulting rate of $2,200 per day, and a design and build rate of $1,500 per day (ex. GST).
Interactive AI Skills Module
A self-paced experience introducing Solstice people to what AI is genuinely good at, where the limits and risks sit, how to work with it well, and what the organisation expects of them when they do. Practical, well-designed, and aligned with Solstice's operational reality.
What this could look like in practice.
A recent module in this format walks a participant through a single working day. It mirrors their working style across five quick moments, tests them against eight real judgement calls with graded feedback, and ends with a personalised dashboard they keep. The four screens below are drawn from that build, restyled here.
The same format adapts to Solstice's own risks, roles and values. It runs in any browser on a phone or desktop, needs no login, and can be deployed as a standalone web experience or packaged for an LMS.
| Component | Detail | Days |
|---|---|---|
| Desktop review | Existing onboarding, internal comms, policies, training content | 1 |
| Co-design workshop | Learning objectives, user needs, technical requirements, success measures | 1 |
| Design & development | Three review cycles: journey & wireframes, working prototype, final revisions & testing | 7 |
| Stakeholder engagement | Reviews, testing, coordination with IT and internal communications | 2 |
| Visual design | AI-generated imagery | 1 |
| Base investment | $20,800 ex. GST | 12 |
| Upgrade | Description | Additional |
|---|---|---|
| Web-based experience | Responsive, desktop and mobile, no LMS required | Included |
| LMS / Captivate deployment | LMS packaging, Captivate development, integration, completion tracking | +5 days · +$11,000 |
| Hybrid illustration approach | 2 to 3 additional days | $3,000 to $4,500 |
| Custom illustration package | 5 days at $1,500 per day | $7,500 |
A team that works where the system meets the human.
Damien Colabattista
Head of Human Centred Design at Opposite, Damien works at the point where psychology meets product — designing the digital tools, services and programs that change how people actually work, rather than the documents that describe it. He brings an entrepreneurial background alongside his clinical training, and a habit of pushing every engagement toward the same practical question: what would someone have to be able to do differently on Monday? He will lead the Solstice engagement, run the readiness review and facilitate the workshops.
Dr Nicholas Duck
Head of Opposite and an Organisational Psychologist with deep experience helping organisations make complex systems easier for people to use and reason about. He leads multidisciplinary projects spanning strategy, capability, communication and system design, with a facilitation style that is practical, engaging and grounded in the realities of the work.
Tim Farley
A Registered Psychologist and Capability Specialist with experience across infrastructure, utilities, property and other regulated environments. His work focuses on decision quality, governance and the design of practical systems for operational settings, translating complex requirements into clear, usable tools and guidance.
Clarity at scale, across dispersed and operationally busy teams.
Compass Group
Compass Group engaged Opposite to improve how key allergy prevention controls were understood and applied across large-scale food production sites, including universities, mining camps and retail venues.
We quickly discovered the sheer complexity of managing allergens in these environments. With the number of known allergens rising, and the risks of getting it wrong severe, the existing systems needed a human-centred rethink.
We reviewed current controls through a behavioural lens and identified where errors were likely to creep in, then redesigned the tools: clearer references, practical checklists and simple visual cues that made it easier for staff to understand what they were dealing with and what to do, especially under pressure.
- Improved staff understanding and consistency of control practices
- Enhanced labelling concepts for safer separation at the source
Woolworths Group
Woolworths Group is not one business. It is a family of businesses, from supermarkets to distribution centres to drinks and retail, each with different operations, different risks and different ways of working. Opposite has supported Woolworths to translate group-wide standards into action across this range, in a way that holds a single standard while respecting how each business actually runs.
The work spans both ends of the system. At the back end, we shaped the standard itself into something clear and navigable. At the front end, we designed the practical tools that turn that standard into everyday behaviour.
The consistent theme has been translating complex requirements into simple, practical experiences that fit within day-to-day operations — designing for use, adoption and sustained improvement rather than producing artefacts in isolation.
- Backend standard restructured into clear foundations, roles and requirements
- Frontline tools that turn the standard into action for each business unit
- A progress view that shows where each business is up to, section by section
Group
Communication & Consultation
An eight-week shape for the recommended Option B.
The timeline can be adjusted to align with Solstice availability, stakeholder access and internal governance timeframes.
| Option | Indicative duration |
|---|---|
| Option A | 3 to 4 weeks |
| Option B Recommended | 7 to 8 weeks |
| Option C | 8 to 10 weeks |
| Optional AI skills module add-on | 5 to 7 weeks |
Program investment summary.
| Option | Days | Price (ex. GST) | Key deliverables |
|---|---|---|---|
| A · AI Foundations Masterclass | 12 | $24,300 | Desktop review, 8 interviews, readiness review, Workshops 1 to 2 |
| B · Capability Program Recommended | 17 | $35,300 | Discovery, 12 interviews, readiness map, 3 workshops, pilot project, toolkit |
| C · Strategic AI Operating System | 23 | $47,800 | Option B plus templates, standards, playbook, workflow design, leadership handover |
| Add-on · Interactive AI Skills Module (base) | 12 | $20,800 | Discovery, co-design, prototype, stakeholder engagement, AI imagery |
| Add-on upgrade · LMS / Captivate | +5 | +$11,000 | LMS packaging, integration support, completion tracking |
All fees are exclusive of GST. Travel and out-of-pocket expenses, if required, would be agreed in advance and charged separately.
Assumptions
- Workshops are delivered remotely unless otherwise agreed
- Stakeholder interviews are coordinated by Solstice Energy
- Relevant materials and access to current artefacts are provided in a timely manner
- Pilot opportunities are nominated early in the project
- One consolidated review process is used for major deliverables
- Effort assumes reasonably efficient access to stakeholders and reviewers
Exclusions
- Full production rollout of solutions beyond the pilot prototypes
- Enterprise-wide technology implementation or licensing
- LMS configuration beyond the optional module scope
- Data engineering or systems integration work
- Large-scale visual asset production beyond the stated scope
- Ongoing measurement after project close
- Travel and accommodation costs
We approach AI capability as a decision design challenge.
Opposite brings together organisational psychology, behavioural insight, human factors and practical design. We do not approach AI as a tooling problem alone. Attention, judgement, workflow, governance and usability all matter, and they matter more in a small, fast-moving organisation than a large one, because there is less slack to absorb a bad decision.
That is why our focus is not on delivering a set of workshops and walking away. It is on helping Solstice build a practical, sustainable capability that improves the quality, consistency and speed of thinking over time.
Everything you have just read, as one system.
Select any node to go back to it. The roadmap is where you tell us what to change.