The Melbourne launch is six weeks away and Anika has just discovered that the logistics partnership holding it together hasn’t had a meaningful conversation with Greenbox in two months. Her analysis is thorough. Her instinct for what to do with it nearly costs them the relationship.
Anika finds the Google Doc on a Tuesday afternoon.
She’s been in Melbourne for nine days, setting up the office space Mika has been working from remotely, introducing herself to local farm contacts, getting the lay of the land. Maya handed off the Melbourne operation in a forty-minute phone call and a link to a shared document titled “Melbourne Logistics: Dani / ColdRun.” The doc was last edited on the 14th of June. It’s now late August.
Anika opens it and starts reading.
ColdRun is a cold-chain logistics company based in Dandenong, run by a woman named Dani Stavros. Dani started ColdRun seven years ago after fifteen years managing refrigerated transport for Coles. She left because she wanted to do things properly: smaller clients, local routes, temperature monitoring that actually worked instead of the tick-box compliance she’d seen at scale. ColdRun has eleven drivers, three refrigerated vans, and a reputation in Melbourne’s food logistics scene for being meticulous.
Maya found Dani through a mutual contact at the Queen Victoria Market. They’d hit it off immediately, two founders who cared about food getting to people in the right condition. Maya’s notes in the Google Doc are enthusiastic. “Dani gets it. She understands the cold chain isn’t just logistics, it’s the product experience. Her monitoring is better than anything we could build.”
The notes go on for three pages. API integration for temperature tracking. Delivery zone coverage across inner and middle Melbourne. A pricing model based on box volume and distance. Notes about Dani’s tech lead, a developer named Raj, who could integrate ColdRun’s tracking with Greenbox’s fulfilment system. Exclamation marks. Underlined phrases. Maya was excited.
Then the notes stop. June 14th. Nothing after that.
Anika knows what happened. Maya got pulled back to Perth by the cross-squad coordination problems and the allergen incident that consumed two months of leadership attention. Melbourne logistics fell off Maya’s calendar. Not deliberately. Not because she didn’t care. Because there were only so many hours in a day and the Perth crises were louder.
Anika picks up the phone.
The call
Dani Stavros answers on the third ring. “ColdRun, Dani speaking.”
“Hi Dani, this is Anika from Greenbox. I’m the Melbourne team lead. I’ve just started. Maya mentioned you’d been working together on the logistics partnership.”
A pause. Just long enough to notice.
“Right. Yes. How’s Maya?”
“She’s well. Flat out with the Perth side of things.”
“I’ll bet.” Dani’s tone is polite. Professional. And cool in a way that tells Anika everything she needs to know. “We’ve been waiting on a few things, actually. The API specifications for the temperature integration. And there was a question about the delivery zones. Maya and I agreed on the inner-ring suburbs verbally, but we never documented the boundary. And the pricing model has a clause about overflow boxes that I think we interpret differently.”
Anika is writing as fast as she can. “A few things” is turning into a list.
“I don’t want to put you on the spot,” Dani says. “But we’ve had a slot reserved in our schedule for Greenbox since June. I’ve been turning away other work to keep that capacity open. I believe in what you’re doing. I wouldn’t have signed up otherwise. But I’ve heard nothing for two months.”
“That’s fair,” Anika says. “I’m going to dig into all of this and come back to you. Would early next week work for a proper catch-up?”
“Monday’s fine. I’ll be at the depot.”
Anika hangs up and sits with the silence for a moment. Dani didn’t sound angry. She sounded tired. The kind of tired that comes from keeping a promise nobody seems to remember you made.
The dig
Anika spends the rest of Tuesday and all of Wednesday mapping the gap. She pulls the Google Doc apart, cross-references it with emails in Maya’s shared inbox, talks to Tom about what was promised on the technical side, and calls Raj at ColdRun to understand his view.
Raj is more direct than Dani. “We were told API specs by the end of June. It’s nearly September. I’ve got a developer who was allocated to this integration and she’s been doing other work for two months because there’s nothing to integrate against.”
Anika writes it down.
By Wednesday evening, she has a complete picture, and it’s worse than she expected.
API specifications: Promised to ColdRun by end of June. Never delivered. Tom says the specs were “mostly done” but got deprioritised during the Perth API incident. They’re in a draft document that nobody’s looked at since July.
Temperature monitoring integration: Maya and Dani discussed this extensively. ColdRun has a real-time temperature monitoring system in their vans. The plan was to feed that data into Greenbox’s fulfilment tracking, so customers could see that their box was kept at the right temperature throughout delivery. It’s a genuine differentiator. But it was never scoped: no acceptance criteria, no data format, no agreement on what “integration” actually means.
Delivery zones: Agreed verbally for inner Melbourne, roughly everything within 15km of the CBD. But the Google Doc has a different boundary than what Dani described on the phone. Maya’s notes say “inner ring plus selected middle suburbs,” which could mean anything.
Pricing model: The base pricing is clear, $8.50 per box for standard zones. But there’s a clause about “overflow volumes”: weeks where Greenbox’s box count exceeds ColdRun’s standard capacity. Maya’s notes say overflow is at cost-plus-10%. Dani told Anika on the phone that overflow is at a flat $12 per box. Both of them think their version is what was agreed.
Four open issues. Any one of them could stall the launch. Together, they’re a partnership that’s been running on goodwill and memory, and both are running out.
The spreadsheet
Anika’s instinct, honed by three years of project management before she joined Greenbox, is to get organised. She opens a fresh spreadsheet on Thursday morning and starts building.
She creates four columns: the issue, the risk if it’s unresolved, the assumption each side is making, and the dependency it creates. She fills in every row methodically. The API specs. The temperature integration. The zones. The pricing. She adds three more rows for things she noticed during her conversations: ColdRun’s driver scheduling needs two weeks’ lead time, Greenbox hasn’t confirmed launch volumes, and there’s no agreement on what happens if a delivery fails.
Seven rows. Colour-coded by severity. Cross-referenced to the Google Doc and the emails. It’s thorough, well-structured, and exactly the kind of document Anika would have been proud of at her previous job. A risk register in everything but name.
She plans to present it to Dani on Monday. “Here’s everything that’s outstanding. Let’s work through it systematically.” She imagines the meeting: professional, efficient, clear. Every issue on the table. Nothing hiding.
She’s proud of it. And she should be. The analysis is excellent.
Sunday evening
Anika calls Lee on Sunday evening. She’s been wanting his perspective. She knows he coached Maya through the early days and she’s read the Event Storming write-up. Lee picks up from Margaret River. She can hear wind and what might be a dog barking.
“I’ve got something I’d like you to look at,” Anika says. She shares her screen.
Lee reads the spreadsheet carefully. He scrolls through each row. He reads the risk descriptions, the assumptions, the dependencies. He takes his time.
“This is really good work,” he says. “You’ve identified the real issues. The pricing ambiguity alone could have blown up mid-launch if nobody caught it.”
Anika feels the validation land. She’s been running on adrenaline for nine days and nobody has told her she’s doing a good job.
“And the API specs, that’s been sitting for two months. You’re right to flag it as critical.”
“Thanks. I’m going to walk Dani through it tomorrow.”
Lee nods. Then he leans back slightly. “Can I ask you something?”
“Of course.”
“When Dani opens this document, what’s she going to see?”
Anika considers. “Everything that needs to happen. All the open issues, clearly laid out.”
“That’s what you see.” Lee pauses. “What will Dani see?”
The question hangs. Anika opens her mouth, then closes it.
“Imagine you’re Dani,” Lee says. His voice is gentle, not leading. “You signed up for this partnership because you believed in Greenbox. You and Maya had a great relationship. Then Maya disappeared. Nobody called for two months. Now a person you’ve met once shows up with a document listing every single thing that’s gone wrong. How do you feel?”
Anika stares at the spreadsheet. She sees it differently now. Seven rows of issues. Each one is a thing Greenbox failed to do. Each one is a thing Dani waited for and didn’t receive. Laid out in a grid. Colour-coded by severity.
“Like I’m being audited,” Anika says quietly.
“The information in here is exactly right,” Lee says. “Every issue is real. The question is how Dani receives it. What do you want Dani to be doing at the end of Monday’s meeting: defending herself, or planning with you?”
“Planning with me.”
“Then the content stays. But the format is a choice about the relationship.”
Anika sits with this. She doesn’t feel corrected. She feels like she’s seeing the same picture from a different angle. The spreadsheet isn’t wrong; it’s just pointed in the wrong direction, at Dani instead of alongside her.
“So what do I do with all this?” She gestures at the screen.
“Keep it,” Lee says. “It’s your thinking tool. It tells you what questions to ask. But on Monday, you’re not presenting a document. You’re starting a conversation.”
Monday morning
Anika doesn’t go to ColdRun’s depot. She calls Dani and asks if she’d like to grab a coffee first. There’s a place on Foster Street near the depot that Dani mentions she likes.
They meet at 9:30. Dani arrives in a ColdRun polo shirt, keys in hand, reading glasses pushed up on her head. She’s in her mid-forties, solid build, the kind of person who looks like she could load a van if she needed to and probably has this morning. She orders a long black. Anika gets a flat white.
Anika doesn’t open her laptop. She doesn’t pull out a document. She asks Dani about ColdRun.
“How did you end up in cold-chain logistics?”
Dani’s face changes. Not dramatically, just a slight softening around the eyes, the way people look when someone asks about something they care about. She tells Anika about her years at Coles, the frustration of watching produce spoil because the monitoring was theatre, the day she decided to do it properly. ColdRun started with one van and Dani driving it. Now it’s eleven drivers, three dedicated refrigerated vehicles, and contracts with six food businesses across Melbourne.
“Greenbox was going to be the seventh,” Dani says. Not accusingly. Factually.
Anika nods. “Tell me about what happened from your end. After Maya’s last call.”
Dani wraps both hands around her coffee. “We were excited. Genuinely. The mission is good: getting farm produce to people’s doors with the cold chain intact, that’s exactly what we do. Maya and I had a great rapport. She understood what temperature monitoring means for produce quality. Most clients just want cheap delivery. Maya wanted it done right.”
“And then?”
“And then she went quiet. I sent two emails in July. One got a reply, three lines, ‘sorry, things are busy, will circle back soon.’ The second one didn’t get a reply at all. I called once in August. Voicemail.” Dani shrugs. “I’m not naive. I run a business. People get busy. But I’d held capacity for Greenbox. Turned away a contract with a meal-kit company because I didn’t want to overcommit our fleet.”
Anika doesn’t defend Maya. She doesn’t explain the Perth crises or the allergen incident or the organisational growing pains. She says, “That’s fair. I would have been frustrated too.”
Dani looks at her. Something shifts: a small assessment, a recalibration. This person isn’t making excuses.
“I want to make this work,” Anika says. “Could we spend an hour mapping out what a successful launch looks like for both of us?”
Dani finishes her coffee. “Let’s go to the depot. I’ve got a whiteboard.”
The alignment session
ColdRun’s depot is a corrugated-iron building in an industrial estate off the Princes Highway. Inside, it’s cleaner than Anika expected: concrete floors, well-organised shelving, the hum of refrigeration units along the back wall. Dani’s office is a glass-walled room in the corner with a view of the loading bay. There’s a whiteboard on one wall, half-covered in driver schedules.
Dani clears a section and hands Anika a marker.
“What does a successful Melbourne launch look like?” Anika asks. “Not just for Greenbox. For ColdRun too.”
Dani picks up a red marker. “Okay. For us: predictable volumes, two weeks’ lead time, clear zones, and the temperature integration working so I can show my other clients what we’re capable of.”
Anika writes it on the left side of the board. “For Greenbox: every box delivered within the time window, cold chain maintained, and a scalable process we’re not reinventing every week.”
She writes that on the right side.
“What would need to be true for both of those to happen?”
This is the question that opens everything up. Not “what’s gone wrong?” Not “what are the risks?” What would need to be true. It points forward instead of backward. It invites Dani to build the answer rather than defend against a list.
Dani starts. “We’d need the delivery zones documented. Not just the suburbs, the routing logic. Which postcodes go on which run. That affects driver scheduling and fuel costs.”
Anika writes it in the middle of the board: Zones and routing agreed.
“We’d need volume forecasts. Not exact numbers. I know you’re launching, but a range. Are we talking two hundred boxes a week or eight hundred? Because that’s one van versus three.”
Volume range confirmed.
“And the pricing. We need to settle the overflow question before launch, not during week three when everyone’s stressed.”
Pricing model finalised, including overflow.
Anika adds her own items. “We need API specs delivered to Raj so the temperature integration can be built. Tom has a draft, I’ve seen it. I think it’s two days of work to finish.”
API specs delivered.
“And we need to scope the temperature integration properly. What data format. What refresh rate. Where it shows up in our system.”
Integration scoped with acceptance criteria.
“And we need a communication rhythm so this doesn’t go silent again.”
Regular check-ins agreed.
Six items on the board. Anika glances at her phone, where the spreadsheet is open in another tab. The same issues are there: delivery zones, pricing, API specs, temperature integration. But they’ve surfaced as shared problems to solve, not as a list of Greenbox’s failures. Dani identified half of them herself.
“I notice we haven’t talked about what happens when things go wrong,” Anika says. “What if a delivery fails? What if the volume spikes beyond the range?”
“I wonder about that too,” Dani says, and reaches for the marker.
They spend twenty minutes on failure modes. Dani is thorough; she’s been doing this for seven years and she knows exactly where cold-chain deliveries go wrong. A driver calls in sick. A fridge unit fails mid-route. A customer isn’t home and there’s nowhere safe to leave a cold box in 35-degree heat.
For each scenario, they write what happens now (improvise) and what should happen at launch (a process). Dani’s experience turns each risk into a practical procedure. The fridge-failure protocol she already runs for her other clients takes sixty seconds to explain and covers everything Anika would have spent an hour trying to specify.
By the end, the whiteboard has two columns: Decided and Open Questions.
Decided: inner Melbourne zones using ColdRun’s existing routing. Base pricing at $8.50 per box. Two weeks’ lead time for volume changes. API specs to Raj by end of this week. Weekly check-in rhythm.
Open questions: overflow pricing (Dani will model two options). Temperature integration scope (needs Tom and Raj in a room together). What “selected middle suburbs” means in practice (Anika will get data on subscriber density from Maya).
“I’ll connect Tom and Raj directly,” Anika says. “They shouldn’t have to go through us for technical questions.”
Dani nods. “That would have saved a month back in June.”
“Yeah,” Anika says. “It would have.”
There’s a beat of silence. Dani looks at the whiteboard. “This is the first useful conversation I’ve had about this partnership since May.”
Anika doesn’t say she’s sorry. She doesn’t say it wasn’t her fault. She says, “Let’s make sure it’s not the last one.”
They agree on a rhythm: one short email from Anika each Friday. One paragraph of progress. One question she needs Dani’s help with. That’s it. No status reports. No slide decks. One paragraph and one question.
“I can reply to that,” Dani says. “I can’t reply to a twelve-page update at 6pm on a Friday.”
The rhythm
The first Friday email goes out at 4:30pm.
Dani. Tom finished the API specs and sent them to Raj yesterday. Raj says he can start the integration next week. Progress: the delivery zone map is drafted using your inner-ring routing, and I’ve got subscriber density data from Maya for the middle suburbs. Question: could you send me the overflow pricing models by Wednesday so I can run them past our finance person? Thanks. Anika
Dani replies Saturday morning.
Got it. Raj confirmed. Overflow models attached. Option A is per-box premium, Option B is a monthly capacity reserve. I’d recommend B but happy either way. Let me know.. D
The second Friday email:
Dani. Overflow pricing: we’re going with Option B (capacity reserve). Maya approved it yesterday. Tom and Raj had their first technical call on Thursday, they’re aligned on data format for the temperature feed. Scoping document attached. Question: can your system push temperature data every 60 seconds, or is 5-minute intervals more realistic for the current hardware?. Anika
Dani replies within two hours.
60 seconds is fine for the newer units. The older van does 5-min intervals. Raj knows which is which. Good progress this week.. D
The emails are short because the asks are clear. Dani responds quickly because each one contains exactly one thing she needs to do. There’s no ambiguity about what’s being asked or what “help” looks like.
Week three
The pricing ambiguity (the one that had both sides interpreting “overflow” differently) gets resolved in week one because Dani feels safe modelling both options. Under the spreadsheet approach, this would have surfaced as “Greenbox and ColdRun disagree on overflow pricing”: a confrontation. Instead it surfaced as “here are two options, which works better for you?”: a collaboration.
The API specs get delivered because Tom and Raj have a direct line now. Anika connected them during the alignment session and stepped back. Raj messages Tom on Slack with technical questions. Tom answers within the hour. The integration that had been stalled since June is scoped, agreed, and partially built by the end of week two.
The delivery zones get resolved because Anika brings subscriber density data to Dani and they draw the boundaries together, using ColdRun’s routing knowledge and Greenbox’s demand data. The “selected middle suburbs” ambiguity disappears when both sides have the same map.
In week three, Dani calls Anika. Not about a problem. About an idea.
“I’ve been thinking about the temperature data. What if we expose it to your customers? Not just internal tracking. A link in the delivery notification: ‘Your box was kept between 2 and 4 degrees for the entire journey.’ My other clients don’t offer that. It could be a selling point for both of us.”
Anika grins. This is what a healthy partnership sounds like. Dani isn’t just executing a logistics contract; she’s contributing ideas. She’s invested. She feels heard, and that makes her generous with her expertise.
“I love that,” Anika says. “Let me talk to Tom about what it’d take on our end.”
What Anika keeps
The spreadsheet is still on Anika’s laptop. She opens it every Monday morning and updates it quietly. The rows have changed: some issues are resolved, new ones have appeared. It’s still colour-coded. It’s still thorough.
She never shows it to Dani. She never shows it to Maya. It’s her private thinking tool, the place where she tracks what she knows, what she’s worried about, and what needs attention. It tells her which questions to ask in the Friday email. It tells her which items on the “Open Questions” column need a nudge.
The spreadsheet is useful. It was always useful. The mistake wouldn’t have been building it. The mistake would have been presenting it.
The call with Maya
Three weeks into the new rhythm, Maya calls Anika from Perth. It’s late, 9pm in Perth, 11pm in Melbourne. Maya sounds tired but lighter than she has in weeks.
“Dani emailed me,” Maya says. “She said the partnership is back on track. She said you’ve been brilliant.”
Anika is sitting on the couch in her rented apartment in Fitzroy, laptop open, the spreadsheet minimised behind her email. “Dani’s been great,” she says. “She had every reason to walk away. She didn’t.”
Maya is quiet for a moment. “I know I left you a mess. The handover was terrible. I should have –”
“You were dealing with the allergen incident and two squads colliding,” Anika says. “I read the postmortems. You had your hands full.”
“Still.”
“The Google Doc was a good start. Dani said you two had great rapport. That mattered; it meant there was something to rebuild, not something to build from scratch.”
Maya exhales. Anika can hear the guilt draining out of it, slowly, like water through sand. “Thank you.”
“Don’t thank me. Fix the Google Doc so the next person who opens it doesn’t think it’s a historical artefact.”
Maya laughs. It’s the first real laugh Anika’s heard from her.
What Lee says
Lee checks in with Anika the following week. She tells him about the alignment session, the Friday emails, the temperature data idea, the resolved pricing.
“The information in your spreadsheet was accurate,” Lee says. “Every risk was real. Every issue needed resolving.”
“But?”
“No but. The information was the right information. A risk register is a useful thinking tool. It helps you see the shape of a problem. The choice is what you do with that clarity. You can present it, which tells the other person ‘I see everything you’ve done wrong.’ Or you can use it to ask better questions, which tells the other person ‘I want to understand your world so we can solve this together.’”
“Same data, different trust outcome,” Anika says.
“Exactly.”
Lee pauses, and she can hear him choosing his next words. “There’s something else you did that I want to name. You didn’t blame Maya. Dani gave you an opening, ‘nobody called for two months’, and you could have said ‘I know, it was a mess, I’m here to fix it.’ That would have felt good in the moment and it would have undermined Maya’s relationship with Dani permanently.”
Anika hadn’t thought of it that way. She’d just felt that blaming Maya wasn’t her place. But Lee is right: it was also a choice about the partnership’s future. If Dani can’t trust that Greenbox speaks with one voice, the partnership is fragile regardless of how good the logistics are.
“You acknowledged Dani’s experience without assigning blame. That’s harder than it sounds.”
Melbourne launches
Six weeks later, the first Melbourne Greenbox deliveries go out on a Thursday morning. Dani’s drivers are on the road by 6am. The temperature monitoring feeds data back to Greenbox’s tracking dashboard in real time: 2.1 degrees in the newer vans, 3.4 in the older one. Every box arrives within the delivery window.
Tom watches the dashboard from Perth. He messages Anika: “The temperature feed is working perfectly. Raj did good work.”
Anika forwards the message to Dani. Dani forwards it to Raj. Small gestures. The kind that make partnerships feel like partnerships instead of contracts.
By the end of the first week, 180 boxes have been delivered in Melbourne. Zero cold-chain failures. Two delivery issues (one wrong address, one locked apartment building) both handled by ColdRun’s existing protocols. The protocols Dani explained in thirty seconds during the alignment session.
Anika opens the spreadsheet one more time. She scrolls through the rows. Most are green now. The ones that aren’t green are in progress and owned. She adds one new row at the bottom, in blue: “Temperature data customer notification: Dani’s idea. Scope with Tom.”
She closes the spreadsheet and opens the Friday email.
Dani. First week done. 180 boxes, zero cold-chain issues, two delivery hiccups handled by your team’s protocols. Tom says the temperature feed is running beautifully. Question: when can we talk about exposing the temperature data to customers? I think you’re right that it’s a differentiator.. Anika
Dani replies in twelve minutes.
Good first week. Let’s talk Tuesday. I’ve got some ideas.. D
Twelve minutes. Because the relationship is real, the asks are clear, and neither side is performing. That’s what alignment looks like: not a perfect plan, but a partnership where both people want to pick up the phone.