The Evil Twin: a technique for taking an outside view of your strategy
When faced with setting your strategy or making an important decision, how do you know you’ve considered enough diverse options and can proceed with confidence?
If you’re like most folks, you might rely on intuition coupled with readily available information—you just go with your gut. This is called taking the inside view:
An inside view considers a problem by focusing on the specific task and by using information that is close at hand, and makes predictions based on that narrow and unique set of inputs. These inputs may include anecdotal evidence and fallacious perceptions.[1]
Sometimes we think the only information that matters is that which is top-of-mind or easily attainable, without considering what might be missing. Any strategy shaped on the inside view will be fundamentally limited.
Compare this approach to the outside view:
Rather than seeing a problem as unique, the outside view wants to know if others have faced comparable problems and, if so, what happened. The outside view is an unnatural way to think, precisely because it forces people to set aside all the cherished information they have gathered. The outside view can often create a very valuable reality check for decision makers. [2]
Clearly, the outside view is more desirable than the inside view, but it’s not always an easy view to take. So how can you set aside your own cherished assumptions, pressure test your strategy, and move forward with confidence in your decision?
Ask your evil twin
I’ve recently come across several related techniques for thinking creatively about strategic questions and (hopefully) adopting the outside view. They each involve considering your question from an adversarial point of view.
In The Vision Driven Leader, Michael Hyatt includes these questions:
“How can we become the company that would put us out of business?”
“What might this predator look like and why would it have an advantage over us?”
Andy Grove had a similar discussion with Gordon Moore, asking what their successors would do in their shoes at Intel in the mid-80s:
“If we got kicked out and the board brought in a new CEO, what do you think he would do?” Gordon answered without hesitation, “He would get us out of memories.” I stared at him, then said, “Why shouldn’t you and I walk out the door, come back and do it ourselves?” [3]
They went on to kill their memory business and focus their resources on microprocessors, changing the businesses forever.
Finally, Suhail Doshi, founder of Mixpanel and Mighty, tweeted:
The best way I’ve thought of to make a startup more formidable and narrowly focused is to tell them what I’d do if I were their faux competitor. The ruthless perspective of a competitor often helps sharpen what’s important & what’s not. So, ask your smart friend what they’d do. Asking your smart friend how they’d compete with you is a more engaging way to get better feedback than asking: “So, what do you think of my idea?” Instead of someone possibly hurting your feelings, the other person gets to generate many ideas that you can use later.
As you explore your strategy, ask yourself what your evil twin would do. How would they put you out of business? What product would they launch, what messaging and positioning would they adopt, what hires would they make? What would their first 90 days look like if your board suddenly replaced you with them?
These kinds of questions will help you avoid the inside view and more fully explore your paths forward.
Follow me on twitter @patrickjwoods.
Footnotes
[1][2] both quotes from Michael Mauboussin’s Think Twice. Also see Thinking, Fast and Slow. Read more at Farnam Street.
[3] from Only the Paranoid Survive, and called “The Revolving Door Test” by Chip & Dan Heath in Decisive.
