What coffee, cocoa and cotton supply chains can learn from design thinking

The Polycrisis Calls for Polysolutions

Neil Walker is a Senior Change Designer at Forum for the Future. In this blog, he explores how experimentation and collaboration can help build more resilient commodity supply chains in the face of growing climate and market pressures.

Commodity supply chains like coffee, cocoa, cotton are under unprecedented pressure. Price volatility, climate and conflict disruption, and regulatory change are exposing a system built for cost, not resilience. Good intentions and sustainability initiatives exist, but they remain fragmented, siloed and unscaled. In this piece, Neil Walker of Forum for the Future argues that overcoming these barriers requires borrowing from design thinking: running structured experiments, building cross-functional ownership, and creating genuinely shared spaces for learning. 

"Small, deliberate prototypes won't fix everything, but they may be how a different logic finally takes root."

It’s 2019, and I’m in the hills above Karongi, Rwanda. Walking with a farmer, her child slung on her back, and several officials, she showed us her coffee trees bearing the red and yellow fruits that would eventually become the coffee I’m sipping on as I write this, or as you read it. The trees were old, needing pruning or cutting to make way for new ones, a description she readily applied to the farming population in the area, too. She was concerned about the ground, too.

It had started raining more regularly in the dry season, the topsoil running off with heavy rains. She relied on the cooperative’s payment for the harvest for her children’s school fees, and with her fellow cooperative members, worked hard to gain compliance with certification regulations to increase the price premium. All the hard work would evaporate if the harvest didn’t come through. We left, and visited another farm, before leaving again to another region, another farmer. 

Fragility and resilience

It’s been seven years since my time in Rwanda, and I no longer work so closely with farmers. Now my role is focused on a different part of the supply chain, working with organisations and businesses on sector transformation in soft commodities like coffee, cocoa and cotton. The fragility and vulnerability in smallholder contexts is echoed in these other areas of the supply chain in different ways. 

Volatility, already a feature of the system (as we wrote about in 2019), has taken on the feeling of permacrisis in commodity markets. In December 2024, the coffee market broke through a price level that had stood since 1977, hitting an all-time high in 2025. Cocoa prices soared from USD 2000 per tonne to a scarcely believable USD 12,000 per tonne in 2025. With increasing global geopolitical conflict creating cascading impacts on an interconnected system of trade, and regulation creating pressures on supply chain relationships, the resilience of supply chains, the question of what resilience really means in supply chain contexts has become increasingly central.  

Words and concepts like ’resilience’ have come into fashion, along with diversification, living income and regenerative. Innovations associated with these concepts are also increasing, however very few have scaled or created the kind of impact needed to deliver resilience. Figure 1: Right

In systems theory, one way of understanding change is to map shifts across three interconnected levels: 

  • Long-term global trends, like climate change, increasing automation or demographic shifts, that are the slow-moving undercurrents of our system, creates downwards pressure on the ways in which we move through the world, our “day-to-day”.  

  • The regime, the day-to-day in which we operate, the dominant structure, culture and practices within our society and system, including things like consumer behaviours, commercial infrastructure, supply chain partnerships. 

  • Innovations and work at the fringes of our system generate upwards pressure, with new ideas breaking into the mainstream. This can include technological innovation, like the rise of generative AI or traceability technologies, but is more useful if it incorporates societal, economic and political innovation, such as the post-growth social and economic movements, circular business models, citizen assemblies and innovative regional or local procurement and planning strategies. (Figure 1)

It is clear to most observers that the current “regime” is facing extreme pressures that I’ve already described in brief. There are responses to these pressures; initiatives, innovations, and models that could lead to a more regenerative and just soft commodity system, but they aren’t scaling or achieving impact. The question continues to be “why?”  Figure 2: Left

Barriers in the regime 

In the middle of the macro and the niche, the “regime”, barriers are preventing action. Two examples come to mind: 

  1. It isn’t that action isn’t happening; it’s that action, like the system itself, is fragmented across multiple levels. Within organisations, sustainability initiatives operate parallel to core business models, not embedded within them. They’re cost centres, or focused on several small-scale initiatives, while key business functions from procurement to sales drive the operational business model.  

  1. In commodity-related sectors, conferences and meetings happen, but dialogue doesn’t. A recent project at Forum for the Future, working with textile manufacturers and brands, underlined this issue – manufacturers felt there were no spaces for meaningful decision-making and dialogue with retailers and brands, and this was raised during an industry conference! A level wider, across sectors and between industries, learnings are rarely shared, a widely held mindset that differences are greater and more meaningful than commonalities. Context is critical and every issue is distinct, but we lose the opportunity to learn from each other if we only focus on what distinguishes us.  

Fundamentally, good intentions have not reconfigured the underlying logic of individualism and fragmentation. How can we overcome these paradigmatic challenges within the system itself to collaborate differently, within organisations, supply chains, and across sectors?

Designing through Chaos 

At Forum, we do a lot of work in a  futures and systems change. But its another practice area that has been drawing my attention for thinking about how to overcome these challenges. Prototyping, as a design principle, starts from a simple premise: that we learn more from doing than from planning, and more from failing small than from failing at scale. In complex or chaotic, volatile systems, experimentation is the only way to learn and progress. 

So, what does this mean?  

We need the system to change, but that doesn’t happen through one big swing. It means running structured experiments, building in the expectation that many of these experiments will not work, and treating that outcome not as reputational risk, but as the most valuable data point available. Perhaps most importantly it can help generate creative, imaginative ideas that can overcome the status quo, “sustainability-as-usual”, and create really exciting outcomes.  

This requires two things that don't come naturally to large organisations. The first is genuine cross-functional ownership. Sustainability innovations only prototype meaningfully when diverse teams are co-designers, not downstream recipients of a finished initiative. Moreover, bringing in diverse stakeholders from the start, not at the end of the process, builds capacity on broader, critical topics impacting the resilience of supply chains and can generate accountability and momentum to take innovations forward. 

The second is shared infrastructure for learning. One of the most costly inefficiencies in sustainability is that organisations, competitors, or sharing them to small groups of peers on unidirectional webinars. We need shared spaces, genuinely pre-competitive, where prototypes and their outcomes, successes and dead ends alike, are pooled. 

Perhaps a third is this. Pioneering organisations are recognising that there is a need to change “in-here”, not just “out-there”. In 2023, we worked with Mars and IDH to underline the importance of hard and soft governance changes within multinationals in enabling sustainability. Running small experiments and supporting internal teams to be innovative is in itself an uncomfortable but necessary condition to the type of changes required for resilient supply chains. 

None of this reconfigures incentive structures overnight. But prototyping does something that large-scale transformation programmes rarely achieve: it creates proof that a different logic can operate inside existing systems. That is how niche innovations break into the mainstream.  

The farmer knew her trees needed cutting back to make way for new growth. The question for the rest of the chain is whether we are willing to do the same. 

We’re curious about working with companies to hold prototyping action sprints with peers, different business functions and experts, to explore what resilience means in the context of specific supply chains and across sectors, and to generate momentum toward genuine innovation. If you are too, get in touch with us at 

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