play successful imagination executives business "strategy making" "original strategies" portfolio management

The eight top executives of a major European metals company gather in the boardroom.

They've been meeting once a week over the last four months to flesh out the next strategic plan.

The senior vice president of the largest business unit sighs.

"This is disheartening," he says, flipping through the pages before him.

"Our portfolio strategy looks an awful lot like the one we came up with five years ago."

He looks at the CEO for some sign of agreement.

"We know the industry's changing fast, the data show it.

All of us feel we've got new business opportunities."

Original Strategies: How About Some Serious Play?

seven years with our same four business areas, the same old thing."

The Senior VP says, "I just don't think we're imaginative enough."

The CEO says, "OK, so how are we supposed to become more imaginative?"

The problem is that all the advancements in the methods and tools for strategy making have not changed the essential challenge, which is to develop original and powerful strategies.

Nor have all these advancements replaced the ultimate source for such strategies: the human imagination.

These executives are looking for a strategy which has the originality and the power to move their company from where they are now to where they need to be in the future.

Over the last four months they have been analyzing their industry and critical success factors of generic strategies.

The idea they are searching will likely come from one - and only one - source: their strategic imagination.

So how do we make it possible for experienced, informed executives to imagine original strategies?

"Research in dozens of companies, shows clearly that what was missing from the strategy making process was some serious play!

To imagine profitably, we need to have the possibility to make choices that do not really matter, to move in directions that may well lead us nowhere, and to say whatever comes to mind.

Playing is one of the best ways to stimulate the imagination.

Unfortunately, while most children play frequently and well, most adults do not.

Using a large supply of Lego bricks and a couple of hours, we gave the executives that started this story the opportunity to construct the best business portfolio they could imagine.

Our experience teaches us however that personal visions are not enough to make a good strategy.

For our imagination to move organizations into action, we must not only produce great ideas.

Today, too many strategic ideas never move beyond a small circle of executives.

As a result, management theorists are rediscovering the importance of story telling.

Such differences appeared not only in the details, but also in the underlying assumptions about how the business works, what the customers want, and how competition might respond.

Perhaps most importantly though, they were able to share a common sense of the gap between where they were today as a business and where they could be tomorrow.

"Play can be a context in which risks can be taken without risk, in which the unimaginable can be imagined without fear, and in which the unhoped for can be realized without hesitation."

When a child can bring others into their imagined world, the next phase of play can begin.

Child psychologists claim that children learn best through play.

In so claiming, they are not referring to the learning process of a grammar lesson, but the essential learning that brings a child successfully to adulthood.

IMD is generally regarded as the business school in the vanguard of executive education.

In our experience, more people than you might first imagine think serious play could be very useful.

But it is also the case that the chances for success are significantly better if the serious play starts at the top.

Professors Roos and Victor are developing an approach for how to apply Serious Play in executive teams.

If you have questions or are interested in a dialogue on this topic, just send an e-mail to: roos@imd.ch or victor@imd.ch.