STEP 3 OUTTHINKER PROCESS - EXPAND – Strategic Narratives

“Ideas are the beginning points of all fortunes.” ~ Napoleon Hill

"If at first, the idea is not absurd, then there is no hope for it." ~ Albert Einstein

One Idea, cultivated, nurtured, and put into action can generate Millions of dollars in revenue.

Many business focus on too few, if not just one idea or innovation.  Betting the farm on one idea can be a recipe for disaster.

Thomas Edison shared, “To get a great idea, come up with lots of them.” 

The problem for your business when you formulate one idea, is it may not be good enough to generate thousands in revenue, let alone millions, or it may fail.

One of the greatest benefits to the Outthinker Process is eliminating ideas which don’t measure up.  Money generating ideas differentiate. They have a long enough shelf-life, it takes time for your competitors to respond, giving you a head start to be the market leader. These are the winners! 

My customer generated 192 ideas.  Were all of them Winners?   Of course not

Here’s how Kaihan Krippendorff helped my customer use Expand to develop 192 “Strategic Narratives” or strategy ideas.

STRATEGIC NARRATIVE

A strategic narrative is a compelling business story that explains your business' background, vision for the future and how employees can contribute to this.

The image here is from Strategic Narrative: A Framework for Accelerating Innovation by Amy Zalman, a global futurist who helps leaders and organizations explore the implications of critical global trends and prepare their organizations for transformative change.

According to https://thestorytellers.com, your strategic narrative will:

• Provide a consistent, shared story that everyone can understand and believe in
• Provide context and clarity: the glue that links the many elements of the organizational journey together in a cohesive way
• Emotionally engage your people in the why, what and how of change
• Energize and align your Executive team as visibly united leaders
• Provide a framework for efficient decision-making and future planning
• Facilitate relevant, action-oriented conversations between leaders and teams
• Inspire belief in leaders as champions and role models of the story
• Create a call to action which will stimulate a shift in mindsets and behaviors

Your strategic narrative is a combination of strategy and culture and his graphic illustrates.

Examples of the most commonly used Strategic Narratives are explained in my previous blogs. You can learn more about the 5 Most Common Outthinker Strategic here.

To learn about all the choices your business might have for Strategic Narratives visit How to Develop A Disruptive Business Model The Outthinker Process - 36 Stratagems. There are 36 different stratagems you can choose to outthink your competition. To review each of the 36, Kaihan created a video you can watch for background on: http://outthinker.com/the-36-stratagems/

Of the thirty-six Outthinker stratagems, some will be of particular relevance to your specific challenge. Start with three “core” stratagems that fairly universally relevant, then pick up to five more stratagems to apply to the leverage points you identified in the prior step.

UTILIZING YOUR LEVERAGE POINTS TO CREATE A STRATEGIC NARRATIVE

In OUTTHINKER PROCESS STEP 2 – DISSECT (3 Leverage Points) Example my customer determined four leverage points to focus on: Process, People, Promotion and Physical Experience.

Kaihan provided several of the best strategic narratives for our leadership team to focus on for these four leverage points.  This helped us to focus on narratives more likely to work for these leverage points. Doing this on your own can accomplish a great number of ideas to innovate. Having an expert like Kaihan to guide us, increased the number of opportunities and shorten the time we invested in crafting ideas.

Under each leverage point and for each narrative, each team member came up with ideas for us to consider, discuss, and rank for our next meeting. Kaihan instructed us to try to come up with 100 or more.  Our team did a superlative job creatively, developing 192 ideas.  There were duplicates for course, some weren’t as strong as others  The intention was not to judge them, simply create them.  In several cases one idea, sparked another or created a synergy with another idea we grouped together in our next session Analyze.  No idea is bad.  Generating a lot of ideas is the best way to get at least one good idea.

Growth demands Strategic Discipline.

The 3 Strategic Disciplines: Priority, Metrics and Meeting Rhythms help your business dramatically improve your forecasting, and alignment, empowering your team to achieve accelerated growth. These Execution principles pave the road to success on your 3-5 year plan.

Positioning Systems helps your business grow through the Four Decisions: People, Strategy, Execution, Cash.  The Outthinker Process is a Strategy Decision. Positioning Systems has the knowledge and experience to help you navigate and determine your best strategy for your future growth. With experts like Kaihan Krippendorff we can bring in their superior experience to elevate your idea generation and decision-making.

We help your business achieve Execution Excellence.

Each of the Four Decisions Produces a specific outcome. In our coaching process, we repeat examples and the definitions  of the Four Decisions frequently to make sure our customers remember the value and result each decision produces for your business.

If you’re business is failing to achieve industry leading results in any of these areas, that Decision should be your One Thing.

Positioning Systems helps mid-sized ($5M - $250M) business Scale-UP. We align your business to focus on Your One Thing!  To achieve growth, you need to evolve in today’s rapidly changing economic environment.  Are you avoiding a conversation with yourself on how to can successfully grow your business? Contact dwick@positioningsystems.com to Scale Up your business! Take our Four Decisions Needs Assessment to discover how your business measures against other Scaled Up companies. We’ll contact you.

NEXT BLOG: ANALYZE – Giving Space to seemingly Impossible Ideas

My customer generated 192 strategic narratives! That’s a lot of ideas to navigate through. How did we decide on the best ideas?  What process did we follow to analyze these and choose which had the most potential to implement. We share my customers next step in the Outthinker Process, Analyze, next blog.