Employing an Imagination Cycle to Keep Your Strategy Fresh with Martin Reeves
"Whatever generalization we might want to make about strategy is increasingly inapplicable to the whole. Therefore, we need to ask, pluralistically not what the approaches to strategy in the modern business environment, but which approach is applicable under which circumstances."?
Martin Reeves?is Chairman of the BCG Henderson Institute, where he explores ideas from beyond the world of business, which have implications for business strategy management.?
He is the co-author of?The Imagination Machine: How to Spark New Ideas and Create Your Company's Future?(HBR Press, 2021), the series?Inspiring the Next Game: Strategy Ideas for Forward Looking Leaders,?and arguably one of the best strategy books of all time:?Your Strategy Needs a Strategy: How to Choose and Execute the Right Approach?(HBR Press, 2015). He has also written numerous articles in top business journals like?MIT Press?and?Harvard Business Review.?
Martin joined BCG in London in 1989 and later moved to Tokyo, where he was responsible for BCG’s business with Western clients. His consulting career has focused on strategy – with equal emphasis on idea origination and development, and application by consulting with clients on their strategy challenges. A perennial generalist, Martin’s interests range widely.?
Martin's Top Insights:?
1. You need varying approaches to strategy (4:40): According to Martin, in a world of increasing complexity and uncertainty, you not only need a strategy, but you need to understand the situation you’re currently in and how competition works in that situation in order to determine the sort of strategy you need. He lists five different approaches to strategy, each of which may be appropriate for different environments: Planning, adapting, visioning, collaborating, and renewing. ?
2. Companies must consider strategies for ecosystems (7:24): The unit of analysis for organizational strategy has evolved. New industries are being created due to evolutions in technology. Companies are forming collaborative ecosystems. ?Many of the rules of corporate strategy no longer apply, because ecosystems are inherently self-correcting, adaptive, and uncontrollable. Companies must let go of trying to plan and carefully manage outcomes within a collaborative ecosystem.?
3. It’s possible to harness the spark of imagination (9:47): Martin researched companies that innovative to create something new in the world and who repeated the process to create another new reality. From this study, he developed six steps to harness imagination: ?
1) Seduction: Something surprises us and causes us to reconsider what we know about reality to come up with an idea.?
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2) Idea: In this stage, we visualize the idea, recombine its components, and apply and remove constraints.?
3) Collision: The new mental model collides with reality through testing. This generates new surprises and sources of inspiration. ?
4) Epidemic: This is when and how the idea spreads.?
5) Codification: The way to tell if an idea has been successful is that it eventually becomes so dull and pervasive that people take it for granted. In this stage, the “surprise” becomes the norm.?
6) Encore: The final stage is the most difficult, because once you’ve found success, to keep generating new ideas, you must restart and return to the beginning. This is the process that Martin describes in his latest book, The Imagination Machine.??
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