Foresight, design, strategic thinking, or system thinking?
Once a foresight practitioner, a design thinker, a strategic thinker, and a system thinker decided to open an innovative bar.
Strategy — map it out yourself
Once a foresight practitioner, a design thinker, a strategic thinker, and a system thinker decided to open an innovative bar.
The foresight practitioner created several plausible futures scenarios of how, when, why, and with whom people will go to the bars in 5–10 years.
The design thinker studied the customer experience of people who visited bars regularly and came up with a new design concept for the bar, with revolutionary seats, tables, additional services, and drinks.
The strategic thinker said that one bar is not an ambitious idea and developed a business plan to launch a chain of bars using a franchise business model.
The system thinker noticed that if the chain becomes popular and fathers begin spending more time in the bars, it will negatively impact the families and, in turn, society. So she offered to add some non-alcohol family activities to the business model so that both fathers and their kids could benefit from it.
There are many strategic and consulting schools, and each of them proposes and promotes its own method, trying to come up with an eye-catching name or a three-letter abbreviation. And this is sensible because, after all, their business is to sell their service, and they, like many other businesses, need to differentiate their products from the competition. But there are some principles upon which any organization operates, and when it needs a new strategy, it has to take them into account.
Business as a system inside of a system
Every company is a system — I call it the “internal value chain.” It is a combination of business processes, tangible assets such as machines, computers, buildings, and intangible assets — corporate culture, competence, brand names, reputation, software, etc. This inner system is integrated with two external systems:
1. The microenvironment, or “external value chain” — customers, suppliers, subcontractors, competitors, and so forth.
2. Macro environment — culture and society, country, governmental activities, laws, economics.
Every business both depends on these external systems and influences them, even if it is a relatively small enterprise. So, we need system thinking to analyze this mutual influence. On the one hand, we need to consider the impact that the environment has on our activities. But, on the other hand, we must be aware of what implications the steps we will take will have in terms of ecology, social life, economic consequences, and many more.
For instance, social media, e-com giants, and electric vehicle manufacturers appeared not only because of technological progress or some entrepreneurs’ visionary thinking but also because society was ready for such shifts. There was a latent demand for such things, and some far-sighted businesspeople leveraged these opportunities. But now, these businesses make an impact on the world, changing supply chains, purchasing habits, carbon footprints, and many other things. And I am not sure that all of them see all the long-term implications their actions may have.
“The times they are a-changing”
Anticipation of the future
But these external systems are in constant change and development. So, we need foresight to anticipate future changes and choose how to accelerate the preferable ones and prevent the undesirable ones.
After the ages of poverty and scarcity, during which only a privileged few could afford to have many different things, the era of prosperity came to the Western world, and it seemed indisputable that people would love to buy things — as many as possible they could. It seemed essential for families who had tried to make ends meet a couple of decades before to have a house, a car, a washing mashing, or a fancy suit. But, as Bob Dilan sang, “the times they are a-changing,” and now many people opt for a low-consumption lifestyle. Some of them are willingly ready to share things — from cars and bikes to flats and wedding dresses. Foresight methods help notice these massive shifts at the very beginning and build plausible futures scenarios that can be used for strategic planning.
Customers-centric world
Every company earns money by:
1. Identifying customers’ needs
2. Offering unique customer values to them
To solve both tasks, we need design thinking because it is the best way to delve deep into customers’ experiences. And even though this body of techniques is associated with product development only, it is exceptionally valuable for strategic thinking.
For example, one of my customers, a fasteners wholesaler, tried to improve its customers’ experience and fine-tune the order placing and execution process. But when the team dived deeply into details, they discovered that clients didn’t care about the process at all. As TRIZ methodology founder Genrick Altshuller loved to repeat, the best process is when there is no process at all, but the job is done. In that case, customers didn’t want to place the orders, and they only had to because there were no other options. And the team proposed a new approach, an inventory management system that let their clients, procurement managers, get rid of the procedure at all. As a result, the procurement managers were happy, and the company attracted many more customers.
Strategy as integration
And finally, we need strategic thinking to integrate all of the above, to “make the whole greater than the sum of its parts.” A strategic thinker is a person who can see both the whole picture — systems in their constant development and small but crucial details such as customers’ needs.
If you would like to organize a foresight game for your team, take a look at my website.
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