Outthinker Process® IDEAS Workshop
Based on our book Outthink the Competition, this Outthinker workshop equips employees at all levels with the tools they need to innovate and strategize in an agile, digital, purpose-driven world to achieve superior results. Outthinker has worked with some of the most highly respected companies throughout the world to achieve strategic clarity and accelerate growth rates 100-120%.
What is it?
The Outthinker Process is a strategic and innovative-thinking workshop that helps participants generate and select unique and intentional strategies, which we call 4th Options®, to achieve sustainable success. It teaches an easy, practical, and repeatable framework that instills company culture with a toolset and common language to address business challenges.
This workshop can be augmented with additional services to help your organization effectively execute ideas from the session, activate an internal community of strategic innovators, sustain learning, and cement mindset change in participants. The workshop can be delivered in multi-day formats in person, virtually, or through a variety of blended learning formats.
Why do you need it?
The level of performance and improvement needed today is unprecedented. To outthink and outperform the competition, leaders and their teams must address business challenges by establishing a clear picture of the destination, the current reality, and the gap between the two in a systematic and structured way. They must then generate innovative strategies, known as 4th Options, that enable the organization to close the gap in ways that the competition does not anticipate.
Through Imagine, participants consider their desired destination. Through Dissect, they examine their current reality. Through Expand, they develop innovative 4th Option strategies to close the gap between the two. Through Analyze, they select and prioritize their best strategies. Through Sell, they learn the right tactics to enroll people in their plans.
When leaders and their teams, individually and collectively, improve their ability to think innovatively and strategically, they also increase their capacity to produce results they really care about. This leads to the possibility of achieving extraordinary performance together with satisfaction and fulfillment for the individuals involved.
Program Outcomes
Participants become acquainted with the core Outthinker research and the IDEAS Framework. They then put the process and tools they learn into use on a business case or a real business challenge they are facing. Immediate application helps participants accelerate their learning of the process, helps the team develop common language to discuss strategy and innovation, and gives them a core set of tools they can use outside of the workshop in their own role. The Outthinker Process Workshop helps participants build their confidence to contribute strategic options for your organization’s innovation portfolio that are both incremental and breakthrough in bottom-line revenue growth.
The Outthinker Process IDEAS Workshop enables participants to:
- Learn a set of strategic and innovative-thinking tools
- Apply these tools to an existing business challenge in their organization
- Apply these tools to an existing business challenge in their organization
- Clarify an innovative strategy
- Define a plan to validate and begin realizing the strategy
- Be ready to replicate the process to generate future disruptive growth strategies
Who is it for?
This highly interactive program is for individuals and teams at all levels that want to learn a robust approach to increase the rate at which they can experiment and pursue new innovative ideas in their company. It is for companies that want to create an entrepreneurial mindset and expand their portfolio of both incremental and transformational innovation options in order to drive growth in both the near and long-term.
- Executive teams
- High–potential programs
- High–potential managers
- Sales, marketing, and business development teams
- Innovation groups and leaders
- Executives and managers responsible for growth or innovation
- Business unit and functional leads
- Chief human resource officers and their teams
- Chief transformation officers and their teams
- Training and development groups
- Business owners and entrepreneurs
- Associations and member groups
- IT, technology, and data analytics organizations
Program Structure
The Outthinker Process IDEAS Workshop is a hands-on session best delivered to groups of 7 to 60 participants who are interested in learning about an important aspect of how the best international companies such as AIG, ABC TV, Qurate Retail Group (QVC), United Technologies, and Microsoft continually produce innovative ideas by outthinking their competitors.
The workshop is highly interactive and can be delivered in 2-hour, half-day, full-day, or multi-day formats. It can be delivered in person, virtually, or through a variety of blended learning formats. A common requested format is an Outthink the Competition (IDEAS) keynote followed by a 1–2-hour workshop to dive deeper into the content with a subset or full group of conference participants (ie: follow up workshop/learning track).
The Outthinker Process IDEAS Workshop is always customized for the client based on their specific needs, goals, and desired transformation for program participants.
Program Components
- Imagine: Focusing on a pressing issue in your business, multiple small groups of participants (5-7 people) explore ideal goals. Concretely identifying future goals helps to drive and define the right strategic question(s) to ask.
- Dissect: While working on the same pressing issue, participants explore the full breadth of leverage points and decide in which areas the strategy should focus.
- Expand: Applying successful strategies used by top-tier companies, participants brainstorm multiple potential solutions.
- Analyze: Sorting through the options, groups ensure that they create space to explore seemingly crazy possibilities, ultimately reaching clarity on a set of innovative ideas or their proposed strategy.
- Sell: Participants present ideas to the broader group, and the ideas are captured and fed back to leadership. Discussing and exploring their firm’s political landscape helps groups define the execution tools and implementation plans.
