A New Way to Think

I also insist that the status quo or current trajectory be among the possibilities considered. This forces the team in later stages to specify what must be true for the status quo to be viable, thereby eliminating the common implicit assumption

If you show me a company where the planners are different from the doers, I will show you a company

But when I looked closely at the process, I realized that the screening methodology the client used involved projecting future sales based on currently existing data. This meant that for innovations that were minor variations on the status quo, relatively compelling data tended to be available, and these projects consistently made it through the va

The traditional model in strategy is to focus on asking the question: What is true? A more effective model for framing and making strategy choices is to focus on the logic behind the choice by asking: What would have to be true?

Begin by asking group members to imagine that they could buy a guarantee that any particular condition will hold true. To which condition would they apply it? The condition they choose is, by inference, the biggest barrier to choosing the possibility under consideration.

the possibilities-based approach forces managers to move away from asking “What is the right answer?” and concentrate instead on “What are the right questions? What specifically must we know in order to make a good decision?”

Step 1: Move from Issues to Choice Conventional strategy-making tends to focus on problems or issues, such as declining profits or market share. As long as this is the case, the organization will fall into the trap of investigating data related to the issues rather than exploring and testing possible solutions. A simple way to get strategists to av

Once selected, the possibility generators must commit themselves to separating their first step—the creation of possibilities—from the subsequent steps of testing and selecting. Managers with critical minds naturally tend to greet each new idea with a long list of reasons why it won’t work. The leader must constantly remind the group that ample tim

We push teams to specify in detail the advantage they aim to achieve or leverage, the scope across which the advantage applies, and the activities throughout the value chain that would deliver the intended advantage across the targeted scope. Otherwise, it is impossible to unpack the logic underlying a possibility and to subject the possibility to