When coaching our clients through a strategy exercise – we use a session we call
Blue Sky – Grey Predators
We think of totally different strategies to help them achieve success in their businesses. This session must not to be confused with the well-known Blue Ocean and Red Sea or TQM (Total Quality Management) exercises, we acknowledge the usefulness of those sessions and would incorporate some of the principles but prefer to go outside the traditional “strategy box” and create a new the vision.
During this creative session there is one very simple rule: Record every idea and negate none. Simple – yet – it surprises everybody. When the delegates get out of their “own way” and pause their “self-limited thinking”, the Blue Sky is the limit and Grey Predators soon become insignificant.
Our Blue Sky – Grey Predators session shows that innovative companies break free from the competitive pack by staking out fundamentally new market space – that is: creating products or services for which there are no direct competitors and eliminate the staff with negative thoughts (the Grey predators). This path to value innovation requires a different mind-set and a systematic way of looking for opportunities, instead of looking within the conventional boundaries, that define how an industry competes, we look methodically across them. By doing so, we find unoccupied territory that represents real value innovation; powerful insights can thus be derived from looking at familiar data from a new perspective.
