Is it time to rethink how we think?
An organization operates in an ecosystem of opportunities where competitive advantage can be won by seeing something others aren’t even aware of.
Why is this so hard?
Is it because we’ve become used to taking all the unique expertise, information and data that exists inside an organization and filtering it through the same lens, the same perspective, the same methods and tools as everyone else.
e.g. SWOT-diagrams, Market Maps, Max Marketing Models, Customer Journeys or Business Model Canvases.
Is it because we have become impressively effective at taking the richness, diversity and unique value of our shared intellectual capital, enabling us to spot, build and deliver unique differentiating value, and make it indistinguishable from our competition?
How do we fix this?
Methods and tools need to be based on what makes the organization uniquely qualified, not what everyone else is doing. Fixing this takes work, but the approach is rather simple ..
I spent five years inside one of the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies leading processes where we upskilled the organization built around its unique talent and culture. This was our process:
1. Identify a shared opportunity where a solution would scale across markets / brands.
2. Find best practice approach(es) external to the organization
3. Work with the best, most enthusiastic and progressive teams to cocreate / redesign the external methodologies to fit our internal environment and culture. Changing the method to fit us instead of the other way around.
4. Ensure efficiency and impact of this process by improving the flow of information between participating teams. We didn’t show up telling teams what to do, we concentrated mostly on having them redesign the process to fit themselves while our job was to capture their learnings and distribute them back to all other teams, dramatically speeding up the organizations capacity to learn. Over time capturing and shaping a general company specific approach.
We did this successfully again and again. On approaches from mindset and language to ways-of-working, insights and sensemaking, data and decision making, measurement, strategy etc..
The unique value that lives inside an organization is its biggest competitive advantage, if we don’t blunt it, it can be our sharpest tool.
