“Future Proofing” Your Company for Next Year and Beyond – Part II
We have all been there – you are out of the office using your Smartphone, Tablet or Laptop and you want to print something. But lugging a bulky printer with you is not feasible.
Enter a company named Zuta Labs, which recently introduced new mobile, robotic printer (that ships in early 2017) the size of a baseball which enables people to print anywhere and on any size paper!
They used the concept we introduced in the October Newsletter of “How Ought the World to Work” to develop an ideal solution to printing something when you are out of the office.
They reasoned that printers are essentially a print head running back and forth on a moving piece of paper, so let’s reverse the process. Let’s place a print head on a set of small wheels and let it move across a sheet of paper, thereby allowing a printer to become tiny.
The Initial Four Steps in “Future Proofing” Your Company
Last month we looked at how to “Future Proof” your company for 2017 and beyond by fostering visionary thinking. This involves moving past the
constraints of your current operations to embrace a future that is very different from today. We examined four components of this open-ended, re-conceptualizing process:
- To start to develop “ideal solutions” you must get inside your customer’s heart and mind to fully understand what your Customer’s needs are and how they sense these needs
- Then utilize the concept of “how ought the world to work” for your customer to create ideal solutions for your customer’s need
- During this process do not limit your possibility thinking, but start from a totally unconstrained point of view so that you think outside the box
- The goal of this process is to generate multiple “ideal solutions” that provide you with an array of options, which may include variants of some ideal solutions
Let us now examine the remaining four steps of “future proofing” your company.
Narrow your ideal solutions to a certain price level or target market
The fifth step is to narrow your ideal solution down to the best solution that can be provided at a certain price level or to a particular market that has pricing constraints. Keep in mind that you are still ignoring your current business in this process and are not taking into account how you currently operate.
Let us look at an example of this narrowing process. Say that you are a mid-priced cruise ship line, and you are completing this re-conceptualizing process. In this step you will evaluate various ideal solutions at a mid-market price level, not a luxury cruise line price level. During the previous steps, you should consider all the ways you could better serve your customer, no matter what the cost, even if a certain idea or option does not fit in your pricing range as a mid-price cruise line. This is because during this step you may be able to modify an idea that is too expensive to provide an improved solution to your current customer within various pricing constraints.
Bear in mind as you are completing this exercise, the absolute best solution you can provide to your customer at a certain price level may change over time with advances in technology or changes in the environment, energy, social, or political arenas affecting your market.
Decide what you are willing to change in your business to provide an improved solution to your customer
The next step involves coming back to the real world and considering where your organization is currently at, and starting to visualize how your business could provide this ideal solution. This stage requires you to look at the personality of your company and its available resources in the context of being able to produce and deliver this ideal or perfect solution. This step also requires you to assess how willing you are to possibly change your entire company philosophy, business model, and operations to be the source of an ideal solution to your customer’s need.
The above process of envisioning, consideration, analysis, and deliberation should lead you to make decisions about how far you are willing to go in the process of creating an ideal solution to your customers’ needs. This phase automatically yields a continuum of options that are available to you as a business owner. You could choose to make the commitment to totally transform your business to be the provider of the ideal solution for your customer (which may also require you to transform your Delivery Channel). Alternatively, you could choose to do nothing at all. Or you could choose to do something in between. Included in this continuum of options are various incremental approaches to moving your current solution toward the ideal solution.
Develop the systems to deliver the improved solution
The seventh step involves determining what systems would need to be changed within your company to deliver the improved solution to your customer. This analysis requires you to consider, design, implement, and perfect the methodologies that will be necessary for delivering this new solution to your customer.
To supply this more desirable solution to your customer, you must engineer into your systems the quality and other attributes that your improved product must contain so that your business can produce the product. By concentrating on the optimization of the system that will be used to provide the new ideal product, you will as a consequence perfect both the product and the system that provides it.
Identify other changes you need to make in your business to provide the solution upon which you have decided
The last step in the re-conceptualizing process is to take a step back and consider what other things in your organization you may wish to change in 
conjunction with providing an improved solution to your customer. To do this, once you have decided on what improved or ideal solution you will be providing, then re-examine your company’s Critical Success Factors to determine if any of them require updating.
If your re-conceptualizing process results in your entity basically continuing in the same direction as it has been going, then most likely you will not have to revise your Critical Success Factors. However, if you are making any substantial change to the direction of your business as reflected in its Vision, then most likely you will need to evaluate and possibly modify your Critical Success Factors and Strategy components.
Just like Zuta Labs did by developing a mobile, robotic printer which enables people to print anywhere and on any size paper, by using the concept and process of “how ought the world to work” to create ideal solutions for your customer’s need, you will be able to “Future Proof” your company.
If you need assistance with how to use this concept of “how ought the world to work” to transform your organization, please contact us using the below information.
Fountainhead Consulting Group, Inc. is an Innovation and Business Planning firm. During the past 17 years we have shown over 1,200 companies how to achieve their goals by using our unique, comprehensive and systematic, innovation, business planning and growth Structure of Success™, Innovation Academy™ and FastTrak Innovation Program™ methodologies. Using the components in these methodologies, each month we examine an aspect of how to transform your business or organization into a true 21st Century operation.
Office phone: (770) 642-4220
www.FountainheadConsultingGroup.com
George.Horrigan@FountainheadConsultingGroup.com
