Summary
Part III
- Pioneering is largely concerned with the generation and exploration of viable alternative options — potential strategic decisions that may unlock new value, strategic advantage and enduring relevance for an enterprise.
- To best explore viable alternative options for enterprise strategy, we must first understand our current enterprise identity, the market need we meet, and how we go about meeting that need. The Business Model Canvas is a good way to review this. Within this framework, our understanding of the enterprise's finances, infrastructure, customers and value proposition can be refreshed.
- The business model review may reveal discrepancies, gaps or issues that require immediate tactical attention. Such items need to be addressed to ensure the business model is optimised within its current context.
- ‘Context' refers to the multitude of circumstances that form the setting within which an enterprise operates. The identity of an enterprise — and the business model that serves it — is shaped to meet the needs of customers within a given context.
- The benefits and consequences your enterprise is experiencing right now are the result of strategic decisions made previously. The only context that matters for strategy now is the future context. But until it is observed, the future is unknown.
- In order to augment default strategy with viable alternative options, we need to enhance our awareness and understanding of possible future contexts. By contrasting our current business model and identity against these possible futures contexts, we may identify strategic opportunities and risk.
- We naturally seek the safety of familiar, evidence-based approaches to assess the probability of certain futures manifesting. But this does little to address the infinite complexity of the future — it only serves to reduce the range of possible future contexts we are inclined to explore. This means that a conventional, evidence- or probability-based approach can only generate the same set of options your competitors have (bringing no distinct strategic advantage).
- Quest-Augmented Strategy requires exploration of possible future contexts that exist beyond likely probability. Such futures cannot exist in ‘fact' — to find them we must systematically leverage our collective imagination.
- Several perspectives can assist us in the exploration of diverse, complex and uncertain futures. By reversing our assumptions and resisting quick fixes and neat conclusions, we can stay in the space of uncertainty for longer. If we then start monitoring trends through various and diverse information feeds, and if we begin to build conversations that invite diverse input around possible futures, our imagination can go further.
- The most effective way to cut through the complexity of a complex possible future context is to use narrative. A useful persona to adopt when telling such stories is that of a newsreader, using the framework of a newspaper or news bulletin. This ensures our stories capture attention, are compelling, and are economic with words.
- Once you have identified a diverse range of possible future contexts that may be of strategic relevance to your enterprise, you are then able to place your current business model and identity in those contexts. By doing this, certain incoherencies may become apparent, which draws into question the future viability of your business model and identity.
- You will likely find that specific overlapping incoherencies exist across multiple possible future contexts. Across these incoherencies, dozens of potential strategic options may exist. But, at this point, whether these options are viable is still unclear. And so, two actions are now required: the continued monitoring of the drivers of change for possible futures, and the use of experiments to address and determine the viability of specific options.
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