Come on, it’s strategy time.  We’ll all get together, get out of the office, leave the day-to-day behind, and free ourselves to… “think outside the box” [eye roll].

Go on then… think outside the box… we’re all waiting…

Don’t worry; we have a toolkit for this.  Some little telescopes we can use to focus us on manageable parts of our universe of options, to reduce the infinite vastness to our human scale, to see it differently and more clearly, and to make it accessible for thought and discussion.

Let’s start with an easy one.  It’s practical, so it’s best for project teams but we can apply it to a broader strategy too.  It comes in two flavours: one for the risk averse; and one for the enthusiastic.  Read the room and take your pick (or just do both to cover all your bases):

Don’t bet on it.

Let’s Imagine a situation where one member of the team is certain their approach is the right one, and other members of the team aren’t quite sure whether their (different) approaches are right or not. This could absolutely be a ‘correctness’ question, but it’s more likely to be a ‘certainty’ question.

Certainties are horrible things. They have a way of filling the room and they’re almost always overblown. They’re generally also produced by a cocktail of biases and self-delusion. But certainties can be challenged and tested.

Asking for people’s confidence levels tends only to amplify the problem, people prone to certainty will overestimate their likelihood of being right, and the opposite is just as true.

Rather, ask what people would bet on it.

• Would you bet £10 that you’re right?
• What about £1,000 (of your own money)?
• Would you bet £1m (that’s probably not your money anymore)?
• Or your job? Or your house? (Do make clear it’s not a threat!)
• Would you quit tomorrow and turn this into a start-up?

That should that focus their thinking on how certain they really are and will tend to level the field between the over-confident and the under-confident. If nothing else it’ll give some insight into the variation in the team when it comes to risk appetite and loss-aversion.

Finally, if someone’s certainty still can’t be shifted, ask them to argue the opposite position.

Unfair comparisons are the most important kind.

Let’s Imagine all this competitor threat analysis we do is pointless.  I have an eight year old so let’s use our favourite analogy.  T-Rex is our girl; what’s her competition?  Well, Spinosaurus is bigger.  Velociraptor’s quicker (and socially co-operative). Pterosaur has sprouted actual wings.  We can run these through some frameworks, do the SWOT, plot their relative positioning on multiple axes, figure out all their defensible niches and where they’re exposed to each other.  

You can see where this is going…  WHAT’S YOUR METEOR?  What’s the change you can’t see coming which will wipe you out?  And not just you, all your competition, and your whole industry.

You can’t meaningfully compare a dinosaur to a rock from space. Comparing dinosaurs to dinosaurs is a fair comparison, but “unfair comparisons are the most important kind” (Benedict Evans).

It’s claimed that chewing gum sales in the US declined 15% in the ten years after the iPhone was released because “Consumers waiting [in] line to pay would look around and make impulse buys. Now, however, we’re so consumed with our phones that we’re not reaching for a pack of gum to stave off our boredom” (Vox). A fair comparison would be chewing gum vs bubble gum. The important comparison is chewing gum vs the Facebook algorithm.

Predicting what your meteor is with any kind of accuracy is probably impossible but it’s definitely informative to try.

Let’s ruin someone’s day.

Finally, here’s a good one from Josh Weltman, perfectly transferrable from its advertising origin:  

“I love thinking about what it would take to turn the day of the creative director at my biggest competitor’s ad company to hell…  I think to myself “What’s in that ad that gets that person so upset?” I may never actually run it, but thinking about it often sends me in the right direction.”

Josh Weltman, Seducing Strangers

Let’s Imagine we crack that ‘killer app’ which turns our competition inside out.  What is that?  But, just as importantly, what’s the competition afraid of us doing?  (Which is really just a more manageable way of tackling ‘what should we be doing?’)  Ruining our competition’s day is obviously not the point, but musing on it will send us down some new and fruitful avenues of thought.