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We are passionate about understanding how the strategic conversations you hold – in boardrooms or hallways – can lead to breakthrough ideas … and why so often they don’t. We have found five mistakes teams often make that tend to kill off the most exciting strategic possibilities, and we’ve come up with a way to counter each mistake, called the IDEAS framework (Imagine, Dissect, Expand, Analyze, Sell).

In this article, I share this framework with you, in addition to a special announcement about a new program we are launching this month (see below).

If you have attended one of our Outthinker workshops, here is a refresher of the IDEAS process. If you have not, here is a “CliffsNotes” version you can apply, today, to come up with a more innovative, disruptive strategic option. If you manage the five phases of your strategic conversations in the way we advocate, you can enable big ideas to make it through your team’s dialogues and launch them into the world.

Imagine

Different thinking is only needed when you have a problem you cannot solve with the current way of thinking. So, when you set up your strategy discussion, start by setting an impossible goal.

Dissect

We all tend to look in the same areas of the problem for a solution. Marketers look at marketing strategies, technologists at product innovations, and human resource people at HR strategies. None of us are immune to the pull of the familiar. So, before you start ideating, step back, dissect the problem, and focus your team on the less-obvious points of leverage. As part of this process, during our Outthinker workshops, we help you apply a framework of eight places to look called the “8Ps:” product, pricing, placement, promotion, positioning, processes, physical experience, and people.

Expand

The more ideas you generate, the more likely you are to find a breakthrough idea. Unfortunately, too often we narrow down too early, so have too few ideas to pick from. By applying “strategic narratives” – essentially patterns of strategy – to your problem, you can naturally generate a greater number of more innovative ideas. During our Outthinker workshops, we help you brainstorm ideas by walking you through a catalog of 36 strategic narratives such as move early to the next battleground, coordinate what is uncoordinated, or create something out of nothing.

Analyze

Having brainstormed many potential strategies, the next step is to sort through and select which ideas your team will advance with. Because your most disruptive ideas will initially look impossible (remember Roger Martin’s warning that you can kill off any new idea by asking to “prove it”), you need to sort through your ideas in a particular way, giving your team time to suspend judgment on the seemingly “crazy” ideas. You will often find that an idea you were about to laugh off as a joke actually reveals itself as remarkably promising in just ten minutes of exploration.

Sell

The key difference between successful serial innovators and frustrated ones is that the successful ones view the political challenge as part of the problem-solving process. So the final stage, as you are working with your team, is to lay out an influencing strategy: identify the stakeholders (investors, partners, colleagues, gatekeepers) you need and thinking through how to get them on board.

Delivering radical results

If you go through these steps – Imagine, Dissect, Expand, Analyze, Sell – you will have a much greater chance of finding an innovative, disruptive strategy that can deliver radical results. The online course we are about to launch walks you, step-by-step, through this process. I hope you get a chance to experience it.

To that end, I’m thrilled to share a new program with you that will deliver the Outthinker experience in a new way.

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We’re launching an amazing Master Business course, through the Gazelles Growth Institute, called “Outthink Your Competition With a 5-Step Process”.

It’s a self-paced online experience that walks students, step-by-step, through the IDEAS framework, which I just summarized above.  Our course is a perfect way to introduce new people to Outthinker or provide a review for those who are already familiar with the process and its benefits.

Because this is a new course, we’re giving our existing community an exclusive, one-time introductory offer. If you register for the course by July 31, you will get 20% off your first registration and up to 44% off for additional colleagues who register for the course. Click here to find out more about the course and to enroll.

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If you have any questions about this course or any of our Outthinker programs, we’d love to talk with you. Please feel free to call my associate, Soyini, at 404-643-7643.

Best Regards,

Kaihan Krippendorff

Leverage
Point
“8Ps” of StrategyOpportunity
for Disruption
Recommended Leverage Points
Position- The farmers, individual and corporate, that you are targeting.

- The need of the agricultural industry that you seek to fill.
3- What technologies do you control that can help you tap into market
segments that you previously thought unreachable?

- What are the potential business alliances you could think about with key players in the segment to serve your customers with integrated solutions? (Serving customers with more integrated solutions example: serving farmers with fertilizers, crop protection and other).
Product- The products you offer, and the characteristics that affect their value to customers.

- The technology you develop for producing those products.
8- What moves are your organization taking to implement Big Data and analytics to your operations? What IoT and blockchain applications can you use?

- What tools and technology could you utilize or develop to improve food quality, traceability, and
production?

- How can you develop a more sustainable production model to accommodate constraints on arable
land?

- What is the future business model needed to serve new differentiated products to your customers?
Promotion- How you connect with farmers and consumers across a variety of locations and industries.
- How to make consumers, producers, and other stakeholders aware of your products and services.
8- How are you connecting your product with individual and corporate farms who could utilize it?
- How could you anticipate market and customer needs to make customers interested in accessing your differentiated products?
PriceHow consumers and other members of the agricultural supply chain pay for access to agricultural products.7- What elements of value comprise your pricing? How do each of those elements satisfy the varying needs of your customers?
Placement- How food products reach consumers. How the technologies, data, and services reach stakeholders in the supply chain.9- What new paths might exist for helping consumers access the food they desire?
- How are you adapting your operations and supply chain to accommodate consumers’ desire for proximity to the food they eat?
- How could you anticipate customer expectation to make products more
accessible to customers/agile supply chain?
- Have you considered urbanization as a part of your growth strategy?
Physical
Experience
- How your food satisfies the needs and desires of your customer.
- How the services you provide to agribusiness fulfill their needs.
9- Where does your food rate on a taste, appearance, and freshness
scale?
- Could the services you provide to companies and farms in the agriculture industry be expanded to meet more needs?
- What senses does your food affect besides hunger? How does your
customer extract value from your food in addition to consumption?
Processes- Guiding your food production operations in a manner cognizant of social pressure.8- How can you manage the supply chain differently to improve traceability and reduce waste?
- How can you innovate systems in production, processing, storing, shipping, retailing, etc.?
- What are new capabilities to increase sustainability (impact on the environment, or ESG) components?
People- The choices you make regarding hiring, organizing, and incentivizing your people and your culture.- How are you leveraging the agricultural experience of your staff bottom-up to achieve your vision?
- How do you anticipate new organizational capabilities needed to perform your future strategy (innovation, exponential technologies needed, agile customer relationship, innovative supply chain)?
- How do you manage your talents to assure suitable development with exposure in the agrifood main challenges/allowing a more sustainable view of the opportunities/cross-sectors?
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