In Uncertain Times, Embrace Imperfectionism

Change is accelerating, with uncertainty and threat of disruption in every industry segment. The pace of change and rise of global winner-take-all competition means that conventional product-market-structure approaches to strategy, as well as core competencies thinking, are difficult to implement in practice and may yield misleading answers. Under today’s conditions, the authors argue that real-time problem solving should be the heart of strategy development rather than theoretical frameworks, and they present a framework for this approach. This approach requires companies to look at strategy through multiple lenses or vantage points, typically anchoring these outside the company in its ecosystem or beyond. Looking at your business through the eyes of your suppliers, customers, current rivals, and potential outside entrants will give you much more perspective on both threats and opportunities than you will get from staying inside your company’s prevailing mindsets and routines. It should also seek to generate new data on these perspectives through experimentation, augmenting this new data by crowdsourcing external ideas and technologies to bring collective intelligence to bear.