STRATEGY

EXPLORATION

Strategic thinking in the digital age.

What is STRATEGY EXPLORATION?

STRATEGY EXPLORATION is a modern technique that applies digital technology to proven knowledge in strategy development.
At the heart of STRATEGY EXPLORATION are we as human beings. Special visualizations,  algorithms and methods address our natural strengths when solving complex problems. Throughout the complete process this support stays transparent. As a result STRATEGY EXPLORATION keeps us as decision makers in control.

What is the added value?

Deeper and broader strategic reasoning. Better and faster results. More ownership and alignment. 
For deeper insights into the neuroscience behind these techniques please refer to the section SCIENCE of THINKING.

How does it work?

Imagine you need to review your current business model because of a pandemic. Together with your colleagues you are discussing different ways to adapt your current strategy. You have selected six dimensions of your existing strategy that you feel need a re-alignment. Those dimensions range from the suppliers you work with to the customers you haven been targeting. For each dimension you and your colleagues have started to work on new options. While outlining your options it became clear that not all new options are going to work well together.

For example, switching to many new suppliers (option 1C) will only work if the product range changes significantly as well (option 2C). Other pairs of options will have similar relationships. Some supporting each other some opposing each other. This automatically leads to a lot of combinations that are not a good fit and to a small number of combinations that are a great fit. Finding the great combinations is very tedious by hand. There are already 324 in this simple example. In real life there are often more options on the table leading quickly to hundred thousands of possible combinations.

This is where the software can help you. It does a fit analysis of the complete table based on the pair-wise relationships that you input. The software then returns only the most consistent combinations weeding out typically more than 90%. What you finally get is a map with these highly consistent combinations. From the map you can read different insights. 

For example, it might turn out that your current “green” strategy offers a incremental shift towards the “pink” strategy. Between “green” and “pink” there are many other strategies which yield a great fit. Things are different if you decide to change your strategy from “green” to “blue”. As the “blue” strategy is on an “isolated island” you would have to make a radical move changing many elements of your current strategy at once.

This simple example shows that instead of excluding unusual ideas and combinations in the beginning it is possible to properly analyze them. In fact it is not only possible, but often very valuable. From my experience the “blue” kinds of strategies get easily neglected when oversimplifying things in fear of complexity. Don’t let this happen to you.

This supply chain case is just a small snippet of what STRATEGY EXPLORATION can do for you. Under the section SERVICES / FORMATS I provide you a full overview of all tools including a description on when to use them.