What’s The Starting Point?

Photo by Maarten van den Heuvel on Unsplash

When we make plans for new offerings, we tend to do so assuming limited resources. 

After all, very few organizations operate with limitless capital, people or other resources. So it makes sense for us to be realistic. Why waste time on planning for something that we’re simply not going to be able to execute?

The issue with this approach, though, is that it limits our ability to imagine what’s actually possible. We avoid the clean slate and the opportunity to envision a more efficient and valuable experience for the customer and instead replace it with incrementalism. 

Put simply, we constrain our own ability to innovate. That’s not just a problem, it could end up becoming a tragedy for the business.  Our incrementalist evolutionary approach could well get washed away by the revolution at large. 

(After all, none us would ever give up those prized tactile keyboards on our mobile devices, would we?)

More to the point, we need to - at the very least - know what the revolution is about and where it’s actually happening. We need to understand if there’s a better way of delivering what we’re doing. One that might not just nudge our markets forward but shift their basis entirely. So, starting from a blank slate and a mindset of limitless potential is a critical planning mindset. 

Of course, we do certainly have constraints we need to live with. We will indeed have to build with what we actually have or can get reasonable access to. 

But the unlimited resources mindset tells us where we need to be and the challenge that’s ahead of us. It tells us whether we need to think far bigger or more differently. It might also tell us that perhaps we need to shift the basis of competition entirely (that is, find a new game to go play). 

So the real question to ask isn’t tell me what we need to do to make money, but rather tell us what we need to do to win for the long term?