How do you uncover your strategy blindspots?

Developing a successful business strategy requires a deep understanding of the market landscape, customer dynamics, and competition. However, even the most experienced strategists have blind spots that hinder their decision-making.?

It’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking we understand the environment in which we operate. However, all too often, strategy is developed by a small group of people at the top who have yet to test their assumptions with diverse and varied perspectives.?

What are the business implications of blindspots?

When we don’t have a practical process to uncover our incorrect assumptions, they typically end up causing broader systemic problems and reducing the value exchange we have with clients.?

The example of Gillette in the men’s shaving business outlined by Rita McGrath in her book Seeing Around Corners, clearly demonstrates this. Gillette’s market share went from 70% to about half that when they ignored the subtle but rapid change in customer trends and a new generation who ended up moving to alternative products.

It may seem like an obvious blind spot now, but at the time the executives of this global business simply failed to test their assumptions against changing client and market conditions.??

Client example

Foundstone recently facilitated the strategic planning process for a mid-sized organisation in the financial services sector. Through the market insights and strategy discovery process, a significant problem was identified.

While the organisation was getting good upfront engagement with their target customers it became clear that something was occurring in a specific phase of their consultation cycle that unintentionally created a sense of risk and uncertainty in the solution from the customer’s perspective.?

This meant they were losing customer interest at this point. They were not explicitly aware of this blindspot until they spent the time to uncover it.

This is the fundamental issue of blind spots – they are gaps in our knowledge that are not easily recognised. We can be distracted from them by noisier more urgent problems and miss pinpointing the areas that will make the biggest difference when changed.

In the case of our client in this example, the strategy process we walked them through uncovered why significant customers were losing interest at crucial points in the client journey – and what they could do about it.?

The right strategy process makes the invisible visible

By utilising the principles of Participative Strategy and Open Strategy we were able to identify this organisation’s biggest blindspots. Through market and client insights, the reason it was happening became clear as well as the subsequent strategy choices that needed to be made to solve it.?

This would have never been discovered if we had taken the traditional top-down approach. The executive team would have simply been oblivious to what specifically was occurring and why.?

How to uncover what has previously been hidden?

In our client example, the application of these combined strategy processes made a significant difference:

Qualitative Customer Conversations (QCCs)?– The organisation was already starting to get some unique insights from client interviews and market research. They extended this out by their leadership team personally having about 10-12 (that’s typically all it takes) Qualitative Customer Conversations (QCCs) with key external stakeholders. These opened up unique insights they were not aware of.

Diverse internal perspectives?– As part of the broader approach, we included frontline staff perspectives on what they saw as the biggest factors in how to solve their most critical client problems, grow new innovative service models, and provide better overall client outcomes.

Design Thinking?– We upskilled the broader team on Design Thinking methodologies including Empathy/Persona Mapping and Customer Journey Mapping. This helped us get a collective picture of client experience across numerous roles that resulted in identifying the major blind spots at critical points.

Leveraged AI to ask better questions?– We ran a number of typical customer questions through Generative AI. The output pointed to specific examples and scenarios that we hadn’t yet considered (in very different industries) where similar issues had been solved.

As a result of implementing these principles, one of the most important problems to solve had become visible; the organisation paused or deferred some of their less impactful internal initiatives and instead focused their attention on implementing a strategy to solve the critical issues they had discovered.

Just imagine for a minute if this organisation hadn’t taken the time to work through a process that uncovered what they weren’t seeing and instead went ahead with a strategy based on their assumptions of what worked for them in the past.?

A proven process to reveal blind spots

A process for uncovering strategy blind spots is essential for developing robust and forward-thinking business strategies.?

By embracing the principles of Participative Strategy and Open Strategy, organisations can tap into collective intelligence, leverage external insights, and address blind spots that hinder decision-making.

Learn more about using these principles to uncover blindspots:

• Seeing Around Corners?– Rita McGrath. This is a must-read book for discovering blindspots and market inflection points related to strategy.?
• Leaders Need to Get Comfortable Collaborating on Strategy?– HBR – Participative Strategy?
• How to Co-Discover Insights?– How a Foundstone client identified blindspots through Design Thinking.

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About Foundstone Advisory?

Foundstone is a business and strategy advisory firm based in Melbourne. We are experts in incorporating Design Thinking, Open Strategy, and Co-Design consulting principles for impactful business strategy.

To find out how to start applying modern and impactful strategy in your organisation and leadership, enquire about our Strategy Consultation here.?