OUR
APPROACH
We offer a strategy approach for blurring industrial fields, where systems thinking, collaboration and attention to what values are co-created is more effective than traditional competitive strategies.
World of business
We enable you to understand and gain advantage in your networked world of business. Today’s business environments are turbulent, complex and uncertain. Companies and organisations in such conditions are exposed to dramatic change. Drivers such as digital and other transformative technologies, new behaviours and values, globalisation and regionalisation, open up for change at system level. New business models and new actor types invade or collaborate with existing actors to transform established industries.
Conventional industry borders blur as actors from different industries engage in collaborative strategies to create new offerings that transform your world of business – your networked field within or between larger ecosystems. We use scenario-planning and systems thinking to better anticipate change in your world of business.
Collaborative strategy
Together with you, we help you design collaborative strategies for your world of business. Relationships in systems – not products or services in themselves – are decisive for success in our interconnected world. It is not products or services that compete, but offerings with actors who are interlinked to create value. In these conditions, competitive strategy with its view that value is created in linear chains is dangerously limiting. Instead, in today’s realities, values are co-created in systems of actors who interact. It is critical to understand the meaning of value by different actors – or rather, what different actors value. A good collaborative strategy enables you to attract others to more effectively create value with you.
Design thinking
When conventional industry borders blur, design thinking is a powerful approach – when combined with systems thinking – to help you understand and take lead in redefining your world of business. Our strategy consulting approach and process is based on design thinking, with bespoke variations depending on the offering area and engagement type. It follows the logic of a creative reframing of your current business, then exploring what business you could be in, and lastly determining what business you should be in.
We structure our design process into five basic modular steps, that also allow for iterations and even cyclical repetitions:
PURPOSING
Our engagements always start with clarifying and creating alignment around the purpose, identifying links to other initiatives, adjusting the process, establishing an effective team and governance, and learning from previous initiatives.
MAPPING
Here we lay a foundation by mapping the current situation and its roots. This creative assessment and reinterpretation of the system and your role can involve mapping of offering systems, distinct competences, actors, how systems have emerged and identifying forces that have shaped them.
EXPLORING
In the next step we bring foresight into the process. It can involve upframing the system and how value is created, identifying invaders, exploring how global trends and unknowns might change the system, creating future scenarios, and reframing the system and conditions for success.
DEFINING
With the foresight as basis, we look more closely at system impacts: values and risks, opportunities and threats. We define options to effectively meet these by changes to how you and others create value in your system. We can here clarify strategic choices and conclude on strategic intent and strategy or technology elements.
CHANGING
Our role is to help you develop capabilities and create better values. In our last design step, we define pathways, identify signposts and how to track these – be it for scenarios, a strategic change or a roadmap. We guide you in setting actions, securing resources, engaging stakeholders and successfully meeting the challenges of driving change.