Designing your next business

In our book Boardroom Creativity we argue that leaders need to take more time to explore and design the future of their business. Business Chief magazine interviewed us on why we think this requires a more creative and iterative approach to strategy development, you can find the article here.

In it, we emphasise that businesses need a combination of both iterative and linear strategy, applying a “both/and” approach. A linear strategy approach is effective when your main objective is ‘exploit’: growing your current business. You start by analyzing the status quo of your own product-market combinations and those of your competition, and you plan the different steps from A to B, execute, finish, and evaluate. The scope of the project is defined at the beginning, with clear expectations, responsibilities and stage-gates to decide when to go to the next step. Developing your future direction, or ‘explore’, requires a different approach. Business innovation is a design challenge. You start from the end, what people imagine the future to look like, and learn by doing, experimenting, failing and adjusting along the way. Setting up pilots and learning from those is a major component. An iterative process is a messy process, circling back and forth but moving forwards nonetheless. It requires creative skills and a different mindset; it takes courage to keep on trying, even when your previous attempt has failed and you’re not sure what’s next. 

Do you apply a different strategic approach to exploit and explore? Are you using your creative skills to design what’s next?