The Strategic Inquiry event is a collaborative innovation journey between our team and yours. It is Design Thinking put to real-world use.
It has as its core aim uncovering and validating new insights, and conceiving completely new ideas for how to engage markets with new innovations.
Because it is carried out collaboratively between our team and yours, we sometimes also refer to it as "Collaborative Inquiry".
From a technical point of view, Strategic Inquiry is a focused application of the appreciative inquiry process. In this case, it is focused on finding entirely new opportunities for your business to deliver breakthrough innovation. This is Discovery–Driven Innovation in its purest form.
The activity itself involves a certain amount of field work and a certain amount of studio work.
Since Strategic Inquiry is such a broad undertaking, we divide it into three different phases, namely...
Each of these is explained in more detail below.
Learning Inquiry is about making objective observations of a situation to learn about the situation as it currently exists. We divide it into two areas, namely Market Inquiry and Business Inquiry. The former is outward–looking, while the latter is inward–looking.
Market Inquiry involves our going out into the field to make observations of product usage and/or service receipt. It includes the practices of Observational Inquiry and Contextual Inquiry (roughly, observing and questioning). These are based on the field of business ethnography and involve studying users using certain products or receiving certain services while in context.
Business Inquiry involves our going inside the business to make similar observations around how it works and how its function depends upon certain business ecosystems and infrastructures. It is just as important as Market Inquiry if we are to ultimately come up with new innovations that can be commercialized successfully.
In the process of making these complimentary observations, Learning Inquiry is asking the questions "What Is?" and "What Is Not?". The latter is important because very often we are in search of what is not present, what is not said, what is not done. This is known as "Absence Thinking", and these are often the illuminating data points that eventually unveil deep insights around unmet (and potentially unarticulated) needs. This is also the place where we watch for compensatory behaviors (aka "work-arounds") from users and recipients, or from the business. Compensatory behaviors almost always point to unmet needs and/or nascent pain points.
Both Market and Business Inquiry provide the learning necessary to move on to the next phase of inquiry, Testing.
Testing Inquiry brings the team together to study and understand the learnings of the prior phase and then mine those learnings for deeper insights into the unsolved "problems behind the problem", and thus the unmet needs at hand.
In this phase, we are asking two very fundamental questions... "Why?" and "Why Not?". As with the "What Is Not? question, the "Why Not?" question is incredibly important because, again, we are in search of what is missing, and at this point, why it is missing (more Absence Thinking). This takes us deeper into an understanding of the many facets of an unmet need, and allows us to dissect any compensatory behaviors observed so as to get at the human psychology and/or business ecosystem causalities behind them.
Key to this process is that it allows us to put forth certain hypotheses as to the reasons behind our observations, and then test those hypotheses against our observations. Sometimes this process just leads to new and better questions, and thus requires us to go out again and undertake additional learning with a new lens of focus.
When finished, Testing Inquiry provides the causal insights needed to move on to the next phase of inquiry, Creating.
Creating Inquiry brings together this same team and challenges them to engage their minds and creative skills to imagine new possibilities that will work for both the market and the business. This is where we seed the creative new ideas that will eventually become better products, services, experiences, and business models.
In Creating Inquiry, we engage participants' imaginations by exploring such questions as "What if... ?" and "What would it look like if we... ?". Subsequently, we engage participants' creativity to conceive new paths forward by leveraging such questions as "How might we... ?". Quite often we weave in and out through questions, reframing them from open to closed, and from closed to open, so that we can build out more well–developed ideas and concepts.
When finished, Creating Inquiry will yield new ideas that can be further developed into actionable new solution concepts.
We are experienced in leading clients through this process of Strategic Inquiry... of deconstructing prevailing value models and then (re)constructing entirely new value models.
In the course of leading these Strategic Inquiry activities, we leverage both the Design Thinking process and our own Flight Board Innovation Method (FB/IM). With respect to the latter method, the Learning phase happens in the context of Market and Business Discovery, while the Testing and Creating phases happen in the context of Oblique Examination. This simply means we look at both the problem space and the solution space from multiple different points of view (oblique angles) rather than from a direct point of view, since the direct point of view tends to blind us to what is missing, whereas oblique, or indirect, points of view often open our eyes to see what is missing.
By their very nature, Strategic Inquiry engagements are very project–oriented and highly collaborative between our team and yours. As such, they can have an extended duration and do not typically involve a particular set number of days or engagement sessions, though they can be planned to be that way (this may slightly reduce their effectiveness however, as some parts of the activity rely on organic and opportunistic turns of events to produce maximum results, and thus tend to be iterative in nature). In each case, we will work with you to set up the Strategic Inquiry experience that is best suited to your needs and desires.
As needed, we can also undertake additional work to help develop the resulting concepts further. This includes work in the areas of
Product Design, Service Design,
Experience Design, and/or Business Model Design.
The Strategic Inquiry Engagement typically follows these steps:
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