A friend shared an online Harvard Business Review article by George Stalk, Jr. and Sam Stewart about how Avoiding Disruption Requires Rapid Decision Making. They advance a model explaining superior fighter pilot performance as a recommended way for how to avoid disruption in your markets.
The model’s acronym is easy enough to remember: SODA, representing Scan–Orient–Decide–Act. Within a few paragraphs, the authors mention brands typically noted for disruption: Amazon, Zappos, and Alibaba. They also share fundamentals behind the model:
All smart ideas, and easily summarized in an acronym. The challenge lies in how to innovatively bring the acronym to life. Let’s build out ideas for activating SODA with your executive team and organization:
The authors point to using big data to identify otherwise-imperceptible patterns and emerging market preferences. We agree: if you have the big data, that’s a huge benefit—one you should use aggressively. Many organizations don’t have data available and need other ideas for scanning the external world to anticipate emerging developments.
One productive technique to anticipate emerging competitors is to list a diverse set of general characteristics of your business. You can start by completing these statements about your organization:
This is a starting point. Once completed, determine who else—whether you perceive them as competitors or not—shares the same characteristics that your team identified across all five areas. To consider unexpected competitors, identify which companies satisfy only two of the criteria and could make a move to disrupt your organization.
Another productive exercise: list the customer benefits (not features) that your brand delivers. Ask which other players inside and outside your market deliver comparable benefits. This can be another source of emerging competitors.
To develop insight into emerging customer trends, identify which customers (and competitors’ customers) move well in advance of the market. Reach out to them, asking what they think is happening today and in the near future. Their answers should unveil insights into where your broader market will head in a few years.
This step involves determining where your organization is most vulnerable. Organizations typically have standard lists of weaknesses and threats that everyone knows. To uncover overlooked vulnerabilities, think about any areas that are missing from the familiar list of weaknesses. Engage your leadership team in this activity and explore the following questions:
Answers to these questions add to the list of potential vulnerabilities. Based on collective input, rank them according to their potential risk and the likelihood to occur within a few years. From this exercise, you can develop a better sense of areas primed for disruption.
This step entails focusing your leadership team on questions to uncover critical organizational truths and insights. The HBR article features a brief set of productive questions for this step. They address customers, capabilities, and the vulnerabilities identified in the Orient stage. To their list, we’d add the following questions to help identify and articulate your organization’s focus:
The final stage addresses the importance of an organization moving quickly and effectively to execute strategies. The authors recommend goal clarity, alignment, and broad communication and employee empowerment as keys for organizations (especially large ones) to continue moving quickly.
Step one is simplifying strategy statements, so they are understandable, mean something, and convey to employees how to act on them. We counsel executive teams to state their strategy statements to individuals who are not directly involved in their development, and ask:
If the answers to these questions aren’t in line with what you hoped, there’s more work to do for your executive team.
A further step is to translate your strategy into concrete behaviors that will help employees understand where to focus their actions to carry the strategy out. Both steps help move the organization to having many employees all pulling in the same direction to implement your strategy.
Scan-Orient-Decide-Act is a solid model for focusing and aligning strategy and as a method for how to avoid disruption. The key is to move it from a handy acronym to routine way of strategizing and implementing. - Originally published in Inside the Executive Suite