We all read about great ideas that never get traction. Sadly, many individuals, start-ups and corporates have expensive lessons however in some cases, you can work your way out of the sunk cost problem by converting your approach into ‘discovery-led strategy’ forward.

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Key takeaways

The trap of significant losses can be reduced with some methodical testing and planning.

What tools do you use when:

• Desiring to move into unknown territory, how does one develop a robust planning methodology?
• With such an unpredictable future, how do organisations allow themselves to be bold enough to pivot quickly?
• Or when faced with disruptive competition or declining markets, how do you let go of the past and explore a new future?
• And when asked to lead innovation, the usual corporate demand is for a definitive business case to follow .. an impossible ask, how do you respond?
• Or if you have built it, and they didn’t come .. where can you move next?

We don’t talk about DISCOVERY-LED STRATEGY enough.

How do you salvage a sunk cost of a solution built which is looking for a problem? All the words of wisdom are to avoid this error in the first place, yet still it happens .. what do you do next?

Firstly, a bit more definition, a discovery-led strategy:

It is not a one-off project, nor a sprint, or consulting piece, not the ‘product-market fit framework’ used by capital investors, nor the ‘Lean canvas customer discovery’ used by startups.

It is a ‘solution looking for a problem’, a strategy whose sole purpose is to find a market for the solution. A strategy to stay fluid and follow the money for future developments. It is an open-ended process, of try, test, fail, until a niche or crevice is discovered and prised into.

As you can see, a very difficult stance for most business managers to accept.

The key ingredient for discovery-led strategies .. is to maintain a firm and structured approach in the process .. including and not limited to:

• Assumptions testing
• Methodical process towards testing
• Setting test and exploration goals
• Milestones, deadlines, timelines
• Triggers / sensitivities
• Measures of success
• Decision making criteria

Yet many organisations and startup entrepreneurs still jump to conclusions, the old fashion way of believing the individual knows best. The difficulty comes in the self-discipline of the process.

In my 20+ organisations career, I have landed in many businesses with dire strategic problems, this tends to be my career journey. I this podcast I provide 5 examples where I have used Discovery-led Strategy

Examples 1&2: were startups who invested in building a solution based on the entrepreneurs’ terrific ideals. Both built their solution and both struggled to connect it to the problem, overtime traction and revenue generation were non-existent.

Examples 3&4: two different organisations, both well established, and their multi-$m revenue relied primarily on fixed term funding for the provision of healthcare services into a define audience base on behalf of their primary funder. Both over time, with increased competition, changing regulation, shifting consumer expectations and lethargy to innovate and evolve, had reached a critical end-of-life point and near immediacy of lost funding due to declining value propositions.

Example 5: was a the classic corporate idea which built a white elephant .. ie a solution with no evidence of market need, it gained no traction and was retired to the sunk cost write-off garage to gather dust.

Hopefully this gives you the energy to speak up about Discovery-led strategies. As long as the obstacles are not overwhelming from the...

Measuring impact or impact evaluation is a complicated and frail science. Having worked several years in healthcare, a lesson learned is to bring impact measures far closer and into your realm of control. In this way you save, time, budget and resources building your own evidence for impact, rather than chasing measures that are far from reach.

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Key takeaways

I have worked on a lot of projects that have promised impact to improve health and wellbeing of the population, to create change through innovation. All of them promise so much and I have yet to see a successful, measurable impact outcome.

The difficulty is setting an impact goal when the outcome is out of your control. Health is influenced by many programs and conditions which makes it difficult to attribute change to any single one program, yet funders and purchases of programs or interventions want to see evidence of impact even though it’s an unrealistic measure to attain.

For example: a six-lesson swimming program to teach basic skills in the event of an emergency (which was evidence based and world class acknowledged). Had an impact assessment which showed nil to negligible skills gained result. Why? Because the average attendance was just one lesson .. it was impossible to yield a successful result!

This is a frailties of impact evaluation - when you look at the program in isolation of the performance of the product or program across its entire customer/user journey.

Impact managers are typically appointed to well-meaning social businesses without a real-world cause and effect correlation, or means to measure and demonstrate how it's really going to impact social problems.

Over the years, I've refined a program called an Evaluation Framework.

One thing I learned is that if you create a framework of measuring, that measures the real time program and product performance in terms of: how many people; what they think about the program; and how well the program and business is surviving and thriving as a commercial outcome. Then you have a viable way for businesses to measure impact by measuring the areas in their control.

By aligning with existing secondary research to make statements about benefits gained, there is no need to wait for longitudinal research or random control trials.

My recommendation, if you're going to do impact monitoring and you're going to spend money on it, start at the beginning of the relationship journey … don't start at the end.

• Links
• Shared Value Project - Shared value is a framework designed to create business solutions to social and environmental problems. Put differently, it’s a means to deliver on your purpose, profitably.
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• Measuring Outcomes: STRENGTHENING NONPROFITS
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• Theory of Change.org – to be honest, I haven’t found a good book yet, what do you suggest?
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• Timestamps:
• [00:46] Impact in Healthcare
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• [02:09] Example 1 – swimming lessons for survival
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• [04:46] Example 2 – adult education for social...

To SWOT or not - that is the question. Some consider it out dated and over simplified, I like to use a modernised quantitative version to inform my business strategies and plans. Listen on to learn how a SWOT can improve your business model and plans.

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What is a SWOT:

SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats) analysis is a framework used to evaluate a company's competitive position and to develop strategic planning. SWOT analysis assesses internal and external factors, as well as current and future potential.

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• Strengths - Strengths describe what an organization excels at and what separates it from the competition: a strong brand, loyal customer base, a strong balance sheet, unique technology, and so on.
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• Weaknesses - Weaknesses stop an organization from performing at its optimum level. They are areas where the business needs to improve to remain competitive: a weak brand, higher-than-average turnover, high levels of debt, an inadequate supply chain, or lack of capital.
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• Opportunities - Opportunities refer to favorable external factors that could give an organization a competitive advantage. For example, change sin tariffs may speed up entering a new export market, increasing sales and market share.
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• Threats - Threats refer to factors that have the potential to harm an organization. Common threats include things like rising costs for materials, increasing competition, tight labor supply.
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• Disadvantages include:
• Many organizations spend half their time looking internally at strengths and weaknesses.
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• Disruptive organizations stay focused on learning outside of the
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• You have to be willing to walk away from some customers in order to run toward the future.
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The modern SWOT

A modern approach to the SWOT using a Gap Analysis to see the gap between expectations. By establishing this SWOT as a survey, organisations can have more specific assessment in critical quadrants of the business model

Business model SWOT

The SWOT analysis help you explore the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats of your business model and visualize on a canvas where business model canvas needs to improve.

To analyse the company's business model against the 9 building blocks of the Business Model Canvas we use a list of analytical questions (derived from OSTERWALDER and PIGNEUR 2010) that you should reflect on in order to determine exactly what areas of your business model need adaptations and where you should focus strategic or planning gaps.

It also has the benefit that progress on achieving those objectives can be similarly measured using the same SWOT approach comparatively 2-3 years later.

The numeric SWOT

The use of conventional SWOT analysis is based on the qualitative analysis and has no means of determining the importance of each SWOT factor. Turning your SWOT into a numeric representation provides a useful outcome by using the traditional brainstorming approach first and then to prioritise gaps providing a numeric value.

Overall, it does helps organisations learn about themselves as well as competitors and can be used as the foundation for developmental strategies.

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