Playing To Win
Generating Creative Strategy Possibilities
Three Vectors of Exploration
The question I am asked probably more than any other is how to come up with creative strategy possibilities. I don’t have a complete answer, but that is no excuse to not provide an answer at all. So, I thought it would take a crack at it in this Playing to Win/Practitioner Insights (PTW/PI) piece called Generating Creative Strategy Possibilities: Three Vectors of Exploration. And as always, you can find all the previous PTW/PI here.
Importance to Strategy
Creative strategy possibilities are essential to strategy because strategy is centrally about distinctiveness. Doing the same things as competitors but trying to do them better than competitors is a hard way to make a buck. Distinctiveness entails doing something that isn’t being/hasn’t been done by competitors — or is so distinctive that there are no competitors.
But you can’t analyze your way to distinctiveness. You can only analyze what has been and what is. Distinctiveness requires imagining what could be — possibilities for a future world. Imagination of strategy possibilities is the only route to distinctiveness.
And I argue that you should imagine multiple possibilities so that you can hold a competition among then, resulting in choosing not a certain one or ‘the right one,’ but rather the one for which the most compelling logical argument can be made.
Of course, this begs the question: how can you come up with the strategy possibilities that power this approach to distinctiveness?
Form of the Answer
The form of the answer can be understood in the context of the knowledge funnel from my 2009 book The Design of Business but also discussed in this earlier piece in the series. The book posits that human knowledge travels a journey that begins with a mystery when we don’t even know how to think about the question (e.g. why do objects fall toward the earth?) and advances to a heuristic when we have developed a way of thinking about it that helps us get toward an answer (e.g. a universal force we will call gravity pushes everything downward) and further advances to an algorithm when we have developed a formula for getting to the right answer (e.g. objects accelerate towards the earth at 32 feet per second-squared).
If I was to tell you that the way to come up with a useful set of strategy possibilities is a mystery, then I would be adding no value — in fact would simply be annoying by telling you that developing strategy possibilities is supremely important but I have no idea how you do so. [Parenthetically, it wouldn’t prevent me from writing a business best seller on the topic. In Good to Great, Jim Collins argued that ‘Level 5 Leadership’ is super-important but admitted that he doesn’t have advice on how to become one.]
If I was to tell you it was an algorithm and give it to you, I wouldn’t be adding much value to you in this particular context. If there was indeed an algorithm for coming up with great strategy possibilities, everybody would run the algorithm and produce the same great strategy possibilities, ensuring that none of them would lead to distinctiveness for you. Happily, there is no such algorithm.
I believe that the generation of useful strategy possibilities is in the heuristic stage of knowledge at this point in the world’s evolution. The is a way of pursuing an answer that improves your chances. But doesn’t guarantee an answer. However, that is what I am offering.
That may be disappointing at first blush. But be careful what you wish for — you might not like what you get. If everything in life becomes an algorithm, life would be hopelessly boring and not lifelike at all. Mysteries and heuristics are what makes life worth living!
The Heuristic: Three Search Vectors
When I develop strategy possibilities, I search along three vectors: analogies, tradeoffs, and anomalies.
Analogies
I was introduced to the general importance of analogies in creativity many years ago by my friend Craig Wynett who headed up innovation at P&G before retiring a few years ago. His view was that every problem you are trying to solve has been solved already — just in a different context. When P&G needed to solve the problem of how to bleach out a stain without damaging the fabric around the stain, it found a solution in an analogy. In chemotherapy, the problem was how to get out the cancer without damaging the healthy tissue around it. P&G used the solution from chemotherapy to solve its bleach problem.
This is a rich vein in creation through analogy with examples like Dyson using the sawmill cyclone as a powerful analogy to solve the problem of suction diminishing as the bag fills in traditional vacuum cleaners, or the George de Mestral using the analogy of burrs on fabric to imagine Velcro. This is a nice article by Ilona Melnychuk on using analogies that has good academic references.
I use analogies all the time in my practice to come up with creative strategic possibilities. When an industrial company was fighting with its distribution channel, P&G’s development of joint value creation as its approach in consumer-packaged goods helped provide a winning possibility. For an auto company, the analogy was SAAS companies. For electronics peripherals, an idea from the fashion accessories business was the key. For a hospital chain, incubator Y Combinator was the inspirational analogy. And so on…
This is a key reason why you can’t be a great strategist working in only one industry as do the vast majority of modern strategists who work in one industry practice their entire career. They don’t develop a repertoire of analogies.
To pursue this vector, ask whether anybody else has solved a problem like mine. Scan other industries. Look for similar situations. Remember it is an analogy not an identity. Don’t go for literality — as benchmarking industry specialists do. The problem will be from a similar but not exact context — or you will be getting something bland and unhelpful. Search broadly — talk to lots of people. You can’t predict where a great idea will come from — analogically.
Tradeoffs
When the problem can be expressed as an either/or tradeoff — i.e. we could do A but it would prevent us from reaping the benefits of B or do B but miss the benefits of A — I use Integrative Thinking to search for creative strategy possibilities. The possibilities arise from attacking rather than accepting the tradeoff. I wrote an initial book on the subject in 2007, The Opposable Mind and a follow up book in 2017 called Creating Great Choices that laid out a concrete methodology for utilizing the methodology. I also wrote a shorter piece on the approach earlier in this series.
I identified three integrative pathways for generating creative strategy possibilities. Four Seasons founder Issy Sharp used the Hidden Gem pathway to create the Four Seasons model which broke the tradeoff between small motels and large convention hotels. Piers Handling used the Double Down pathway to take the Toronto International Film Festival from obscurity to the most important in the world by creating a more creative solution than either the traditional inclusive community festival or the exclusive industry festival. And AG Lafley used the Decomposition pathway to create Connect & Develop, splitting innovation into invention and commercialization and opening the possibility of applying different models to the two activities.
Whenever I come up with something interesting, I almost always find others that have been thinking about the subject. In this case a Russian engineer and inventor named Genrich Altshuller was thinking about tradeoffs beginning in 1946 and created a technique called TRIZ — or The Theory of Inventive Problem Solving (the acronym comes from the Russian Teo”iya Resheniya Izobreta”elskikh Zadach) — that focuses on resolving tradeoffs. It takes an unsurprisingly engineering-focused approach featuring a large matrix describing all the possible technical tradeoffs one could solve. Good articles on TRIZ can be found here and here.
Anomalies
The third vector that I utilize to come up with creative strategy possibilities is anomalies. As I wrote about in Harvard Business Review many years ago, I was influenced regarding this vector by Dr. Stephen Scherer, a world-leading autism spectrum disorder (ASD) researcher. He explained to me that all his most important research discoveries arose from paying attention to anomalies that everyone else in the field ignored — because they were anomalies. As with most businesspeople, medical researchers are drawn to and obsess about means, medians, and modes — where no creativity exists.
I pay attention to anomalies that may reveal something current hidden from the mainstream. It was a small group of hackers who were willing to put up with inefficient powerless machines like Altair 8800, Commodore PET, TRS-80 and Apple II in the mid-1970s — because they wanted control of their own machine regardless of how feeble it was. But it turned out that everybody, not just hackers, valued the control. Anita Roddick started selling products that were ethically sourced, cruelty-free and natural to the then-anomalous customers of her Body Shop — but they too were leading indicators of a broader underlying phenomenon.
While most people know Malcom Gladwell for The Tipping Point, the book that launched him on the path to being that most influential non-fiction writer of his generation, that book was a follow-up to an article a couple of years earlier called The Coolhunt, which was about how sneaker companies looked to anomalous users for insights as to what shoe designs might have broader appeal.
A Combination of Vectors
The massively successful Olay strategy used as a comprehensive example in Playing to Win represents a creative strategy possibility that was the combination of all three vectors.
The analogy was Shiseido, which AG Lafley knew from having just come back from running P&G Asia-Pacific based in Kobe, Japan. Japanese women spend much more time and money on skin care than American women — or anybody else — and they start at a much earlier age than in the US. Young girls are taught the Shiseido seven-step process for proactive skin care. Maybe American (and women elsewhere) could be similarly interested in taking up skin care regimens earlier in their lives.
The tradeoff was between brands (like Oil of Olay) that were sold in the mass channel (Walmart, Kroger, CVS) versus brands (like Clarins or La Prairie) that were sold in the prestige channel (Neiman Marcus, Sephora). Maybe there was a way to get critical elements from the prestige channel in a mass channel experience.
The anomaly was that (as of 2000) a small percentage of US women aged 25–49 followed a skin care regimen that involved using face cream daily. They were dwarfed by women 50+ whose purchases dominated the category and on whom the category almost exclusively focused. But these younger women existed despite not being marketed to at all. Maybe they could be the core of a new target segment.
Deploying those three vectors created a strategic possibility of a skin care product targeted at women aged 25–49 who were open to adopting a formal skin care regimen and sold through the mass channels in a way that incorporated the best of the prestige shopper experience — and it became the leading skin care brand in the world.
Practitioner Insights
Creative strategy possibilities are the key to a distinctive strategy. There is no algorithmic formula for creating them. But there is a heuristic, a way of pursuing creative possibilities across three vectors. Look for a helpful analogy and imagine some sort of possibility based on it. Take existing options and put them in opposition, then find a way around the tradeoff either by way of Hidden Gem, Double Down, or Decomposition. Pay attention to anomalies. One may predict the mainstream of the future. Use all three individually or in combination and you will generate powerful strategy possibilities.
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As a reminder, I previewed in January 2025 that I am doing a PTW/PI podcast series with friend Tiffani Bova. The sixth in the series will be on LinkedIn here on Wednesday, May 21st at 12 noon EST and 9am PST. Look forward to seeing you there.
