Decommoditize
Decommoditize is a method to create new value for customers and hence increased organizational performance and reputation.
Uses of the method
- To significantly uprate products and services beyond competitor offers
Benefits
Disadvantages
Steps to complete
- Ask participants to read the article by Daniel Burrus noted in Further Reference below and then use the template to express their ideas for improvement of your company, product or service.
- Determine the fixed elements (almost certain hard trends) that will inform your strategic response: slow-changing phenomena e.g. demographic shifts, constrained situations e.g. resource limits, in the pipeline e.g. aging of baby boomers, inevitable collisions e.g. climate change arguments.
- Capture critical variables i.e. uncertainties, soft trends and potential surprises. Both these and the predetermined elements will be key to creating scenarios and examining potential future paradigm shifts.
- Capture the most exciting and feared ideas.
- Capture unique insight into new ways of seeing that can be utilized by the organization.
- What conclusions can we draw from the exercise(s)?
- How might the future be different?
- How does A affect B?
- What is likely to remain the same or change significantly?
- What are the likely outcomes?
- What and who will likely shape our future?
- Where could we be most affected by change?
- What might we do about it?
- What don't we know that we need to know?
- What should we do now, today?
- Why do we care?
- When should we aim to meet on this?
- Finish by noting your next steps. Next steps could include a further round of iteration, a recommendation on how to get the answers or use of other research and methods such as Starburst to create more vantage points on the issue.
Collaboration
This method and your response can be shared with other members or kept private using the 'Privacy' field and through the 'Tag', 'Report' and 'Forum' functionalities. Use 'Tag' and/or 'Report' to aggregate your analyzes, or add a 'Forum' to ask others where they agree/disagree and encourage them to make their own analysis from their unique vantage point.
Click the 'Invite tab to send invitations to other members or non-members (colleagues, external experts etc.) to ask for their input. You can whether or not you want anonymous responses. These can be viewed and exported within the Responses tab.
Further reference
History
- This method was created by Shaping Tomorrow from Daniel Burrus' article using mathematical power functions to challenge the status quo.
Contact us
Even with all the advice and tools we have provided here starting a foresight project from scratch can be a daunting prospect to a beginner. Let us know if you need help with this method or want a group facilitation exercise or full project or program carrying out by us. We promise to leave behind more internal knowledgeable people who can expand your initiative for better organizational performance.
Contact us today for a free discussion on your needs.
Are there other enhancements or new methods you would like to see here? Let us know and we will do our best to respond with a solution quickly.
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