Stone Mantel Webinar: Thriving in Uncertainty

Friends, I hope you’ll enjoy this webinar about helping companies to think about and design for uncertainty. Experience strategists spend far too much time designing for the ideal and the permanent—when neither is real. In this webinar, my friend Brian Briskey and I will share two skills that all strategists should have: situational market analysis and scenario planning. You need these skills so you can help your company respond to the ever changing world, market forces, and customer needs. Stop designing for the ideal and the permanent! Start thinking about future scenarios and markets!

Here’s the transcript:

Dave Norton: [00:00:00] Hey, everyone, we want to welcome you to our, first monthly webinar. I know many of you have been a part of our webinar process in the past, but this is our first webinar that we're doing that is completely asynchronous. We're not trying to get you to show up on our schedule, but instead providing the webinar to you, in such a way that you can watch it whenever you want.

It's a little bit different than a podcast, right? You've been listening to our podcasts, or maybe you have been paying attention to some of the things that I've been writing on Substack. Lately, this is going to be more of a webinar. And for today's session, we're going to have a special guest, Brian Briskey, who, is a fantastic strategist, does great work in scenario planning, is going to be my partner in crime today.

[00:01:00] As we talk about Thriving in uncertainty. We've been bringing this topic up a lot lately. Experienced strategists, tend to focus on uncertainty on that the customer will behave in a certain way. If there's anything that we know about the last, what, five, seven years is that you can't predict.

major changes that are going to happen in world economics in, the way that you deliver your product. And that can cause a lot of risk and a lot of fear. So today we're going to talk about two concepts that we think will help you as a company to be more prepared for, risk for uncertainty, and, still get incredible design out of.

What you're trying to accomplish. So Brian, welcome. It's great to [00:02:00] have you here. Thank you for having me. I really appreciate it. This is you and I were just talking recently about this question. And it's a question that I've posed to a lot of organizations, which is why do companies design for the ideal and the permanent?

What are your thoughts on that? Why do we design for the ideal and the permanent? There's nothing permanent in our world, but companies designed for the ideal and the permanent. Why is that?

Brian Briskey: We could, all share the experience of being in the same boat with a lot of different strategists how they came up through, the same kind of management science and westernized thinking that is, there is this ideal stereotype or archetype that we're trying to shoot for.

It's simple and convenient to pick one and focus on it. When you have limited resources. Also, it is a lot easier to sell inside the company to get the buy in, especially when you have finance that wants everything very carefully accounted for. So there are many different pressures and forces inside a company to work [00:03:00] on this.

However, good strategists know the ideal really is what's inside the bell curve in one standard deviation. And the best strategists understand how to work just outside that standard deviation. So today I'm excited. We're going to get a chance to talk about this. What would it be like if you broke from the norm, if you were willing to be a bit of an iconoclast from your organization and say, okay, if I had to work outside of what is ideal, whichever, but which we could also call mediocre, the average, what is that going to look like?

So, yeah, I'm excited. I

Dave Norton: love that. I, I kind of arrived at this question from a different path. I've been troubled for some time by. Kind of the ideal

Brian Briskey: persona,

Dave Norton: the ideal journey map and the ideal metric, because I feel like it doesn't really represent the reality of what people are actually doing in their [00:04:00] lives.

And especially when you've got a really complex, business model where you have different channels doing different things and competitors are doing all kinds of different things. It's crazy to think that, you can kind of design for the ideal. Did you see in the news about Walgreens closing like 900 stores?

Brian Briskey: Oh yeah. Oh, I'd love to be in the room to hear how they arrived at that choice, because if that's what they feel is their best option at this time, I wonder where they missed all the other

Dave Norton: options. Well, they've been struggling for a long time, and it's been 20 years, Brian, that Amazon has been in their rear view mirror, right?

And they simply couldn't make change because their business model was kind of this ideal, this permanent, you know, you've got the pharmacy and then you've got the conveniences and that's, that's been their business model [00:05:00] all along. So, I think this is a really, really big issue and a big concern for, for companies.

And one of the reasons why I think companies, focus on the ideal and the permanent is because they're scalable. You know, and if you're going to grow, you've got to be scalable and they don't know any other way to scale unless you are actually, geez, I don't think that they can think in terms of

Brian Briskey: Yeah, it's not a permanent kind of thing.

That's because it's easy to add another location right to scale, but that requires assuming that you can pick one ideal user type and copy paste across the nation or across the wherever you're going to go in your territory. But the reality is, as you and I know through contextual based segmentation.

The demographics may be the least important attribute [00:06:00] around who your customer is. So if it was easy as saying all people of this age and this gender and this income type, then everything would be simple. But we're in a complex world, which means that the environmental factors. So for example, where is Walgreens versus Amazon going to be successful over on, let's say the East coast right now, after the results of the hurricanes?

There were huge opportunities as the retailer of security, safety, choice, and preference to have close ties with the community. Based on that, you know, annual sort of live system right now. All I'm familiar with is Walmart just stocks up on extra toilet paper. Every time people think of recessions coming, okay, that's not really localization.

And certainly if the internet goes down, unless Starlink comes in, Amazon's out, you know, I'm not going to be successful there either. So, you know, something people can think about, I would pause it as a first question to you, strategists and user designers out there. When you look at one of your profiles.

And you go down all those attributes. How many do [00:07:00] you have? Are you stopping at what? Five, six, 20, 50. And how many of those are contextually based,

Dave Norton: right?

Brian Briskey: That's what the goldmine is.

Dave Norton: Yeah, I totally agree. So today we're going to talk about two strategic skills that we think all strategists need to have.

The first is I'm going to cover, it has to do with situational markets, thinking about your market. As a contextual market. So we'll, we'll cover that first and then you're going to talk about scenario planning, right? Excellent. All right. So let's jump in. Let's get started here. So first of all, I want to define what I mean by a situational market.

Now the term market went through a transformation back in the fifties. It used to be that you went to the market before the 1950s, you went to the market to buy stuff. But with the advent [00:08:00] of advertising and marketing and so forth, that term changed and a market became a type of person. So today we think of, you know, we always say, who is your market?

Which is an odd thing for anybody who lived before, the 1950s. They would have thought of, it as where is your market? You know, like it would have been a totally different thing. And that has helped us progress in many ways. I think there's been something useful about thinking about who is your market and marketing associated with that.

Companies that consider their markets. To be, just a certain number or type of person today are putting artificial constraints on their solutions. So can you imagine, for example, Google saying our target market is. [00:09:00] People who have to do research, scholars, you know, that's it That's that's our target audience It would be that would be terribly limiting for google or for apple to do the same type of thing We only want people Who are this demographic?

The most successful companies that are out there today Spend very little time thinking about And much more time thinking about something else. And we're going to talk about that something else here in a minute. I believe that as we add more artificial intelligence into the marketplace as a whole, that companies are going to need to Redefine how they think about markets.

Instead of thinking about markets as, a target audience, we need to start thinking about markets in kind of that original [00:10:00] definition, which is. Whenever there is a buyer and a seller those two things come together We don't have to go somewhere anymore for that because we have technology that can support us, but we need to have that kind of mindset that if there's a need There's probably somebody that's going to sell to that need.

And the marketplace is ever present, always there for us, always able to accomplish things very different than thinking about who is our target market.

Brian Briskey: And would you say, Dave, that is a way of thinking about maybe the market starts and goes bottom up as opposed to these high level categories of researchers and therefore the role of scholars, right, but saying there is a use case or a need.

And everything builds up from there. And that's what leads you to decide, okay, what is the actual value proposition? And even from there, what's the portfolio and even a higher than that, what's the supporting business model, which I think you're about to talk about the difference of two business models, [00:11:00] trying to solve the same need.

Different success and outcomes.

Dave Norton: Absolutely. So let's go there for a second. Picture taking phenomenal amount of pictures that people take today. And we have to ask ourselves, which business model would we rather have? Would we rather have Apple's business model or cannons? Okay. Canon is still considered the giant in the camera business.

And if you go to their website and you look at, uh, the, the way that they talk about, uh, their business and their business model, you know, they have these different sectors that they're in. So they have imaging, they have professional photography, they have, Consumer goods, that all of these, what we would consider to be traditional verticals.

And in most cases, they own those verticals. But which business model would you [00:12:00] rather have? Canons or apples? There is so much more photography that is happening because Apple doesn't think in terms of just these different who are our target audience type mindsets. They think in terms of a situation has arisen.

There's a need. I need to take a picture. How do I do that as simply as I possibly can. And so, even though Canon is technically the category leader, Apple is by far, selling, more product, more solutions. Has a much greater reach than Canon ever will. And Canon continues to get smaller and smaller, even as they remain the leader in their artificial category.

So I think the stakes are very high for how we think about what is a market and how we [00:13:00]support a particular market. And I think to some degree, what I'm describing. would resonate very well with Clayton Christensen's work on Jobs to be Done. There was a lot of conversation about the job is the milkshake.

You might remember the story that he told about he worked for a certain restaurant, helping them to think about how they might increase sales And he studied milkshakes, right? And said when in the morning, when I'm going on my morning commute, I'm bored. I, I use a milkshake in one way. And in the afternoon when I'm with my daughter, and we're enjoying a milkshake, I hire that milkshake.

That was his work, right? I hired that milkshake for something different and he didn't take it so far. But I think what he could have said is those are actually two different markets, two different situational markets. [00:14:00] And if we look at them as two totally different markets, then we can double the amount of volume that we're creating around milkshakes, which I think is, a really fascinating idea.

And, oh, by the way, when we think in terms of situational markets, we're, we're much more likely to be adaptable, to be flexible, to have, as a business model, ways of adding on new situations that we can go after. Because when you see markets, as kind of the who, the customer, then you tend to create these ideal representations.

Of who the customer is that are very rigid and unable to adapt and that limits the number of people in another session that I ran and I think I talked about this in sub stack as well I talked about procter and [00:15:00] gamble launching a new formula for a skincare product and They had to find a customer for it Okay And so

Brian Briskey: anything in categories Yeah, right,

Dave Norton: right.

So and they had all of this segmentation that they were doing but they had to find identify a specific Who or else they couldn't launch it?

Brian Briskey: it's really interesting you mentioned that dave because i've seen a variety of the types of segmentation that companies like png has and what it looks like is a table with a name of a type of character at the top And then you go down the side and it's basically every single row is like a type of attribute, but they're very stovepipes and columns, right?

And what maybe the word market itself is not doing a good service at this point, because it makes you think of like these categories or these buckets. It really could maybe be thought more of a cluster of use cases. And [00:16:00] depending on where you want to exist in that cluster of grapes, is closer or farther away from the center of the great pile.

Because these attributes are things that are important to people change. Like you mentioned back with the example of the, milkshake, I think what was really cool about that is discovering that people were not hiring a milkshake because they wanted another beverage and they wanted something sweet.

They were hiring a milkshake because it had the properties of feeling like it was giving you a fullness. in the morning because you were too busy commuting to work to have a full meal and it was conveniently formatted into something you could pick up while you're driving and slurp and then put down so it's basically the soylent green of Convenience commuting meals in a sense But the fact is the people were looking for those attributes because they were trying to get the feeling of being full With the convenience of being able to still drive uninterrupted than having to unwrap a burger or a sandwich or something else.[00:17:00]

So,

Dave Norton: people who like experienced strategists who tend to think in terms of use cases, tend to think In terms of jobs to be done, but the problem remains within companies that they want to grow their markets and the way that they think about their markets is still the stovepipe approach.

And what I'm arguing is that it is frequency. Not a number of people that really makes the difference. And as a, you know, we're still dealing with this scalability issue, which, how do you scale? Well, you scale by looking at, the number of times that this Particular situation arises and then supporting those.

So that's kind of where the scale comes from. So you might start with when people are working at home, and that might [00:18:00] be one situation that you're looking at. How often does that happen when people are watching TV? You look at how often that happens, the frequency of it. But the basic idea is that you start to define your market by a when statement Instead of starting with a people, statement when you think of these ideal personas You're still starting with a who it's still kind of that traditional target market type of thing the other reason why I think We need to focus on the situation is because this is the way the customer is behaving now, right?

They don't have these big moments of truth anymore. We're not following kind of this linear process. Now they have all kinds of a little micro moments where they have to make a decision. And if they're ready for it, they can make the decision very quickly because the technology supports them. Absolutely.

So we're really starting to see a lot [00:19:00] of specific situations, where, you know, I'm very, very much empowered and I want my experience to be supported that way. Now, I want to suggest that there aren't times that you don't need to know the who, like if your product is designed for new doctors, and you're teaching them new insights about their profession, then the who kind of matters.

You need to be thinking about that specific person, and those are unique situations that you find yourself in. In that case, Your when statement would probably include the words doctors or new doctors in the when statement, When you're dealing with something that is more broad based perhaps you should back away from the whole stereotype type thing And start thinking more broad based.

So if it's most people and it's a common [00:20:00] situation like People who want to use AI to speed up finding important documents. Well, then you can say most people who want to use AI to speed up finding important documents You might narrow it down a little bit and say when employees want to use AI To speed up finding important documents.

There may be a reason to do that, but those to me represent two different ways to approach it one's a little bit more specific One's a little bit broader. One has a little bit more focus on who the people are. Whereas the other doesn't. And I think that that makes the company automatically just to think in more flexible terms.

Brian Briskey: Well, yeah, you bring up a good point or at least optionality for a strategist. So for those that are wondering out there, Hey, how do I grow my market share? The common response is, well, you should just add more people. Okay. [00:21:00] Well, what if instead you would be able to increase the revenue by focusing on the people that have more frequency?

That's that may be the true value. You're really looking for the power users or the true fans is the Kevin Kelly reference would go in terms of the people that are the higher loyalty, because it's expensive. If you think about the customer acquisition costs of a brand new customer versus a customer retention cost is far cheaper.

So if you had to choose between the two, I mean, I would always default unless someone presented me a really compelling economic argument, choose to double down on those that are already existing users and increase the frequency amount.

Dave Norton: Yeah, that's exactly the logic that we're looking at here.

And if the situation is common enough, you're going to find that there's a lot of people out there that are going to be interested in this. So let's talk about how, cause one of the key things that companies struggle with is, okay, how do I [00:22:00] scale this? And, um, there may be, um, any number of ways that you could build a scalable formula to me, you would start with the total number of customers.

One way to look at it, be to start with the total number of customers that you have. So track the number of people who don't experience. The particular situation and then simply multiply by the estimated frequency of the situation. So if you have 250, 000 total customers 100, 000 of which don't experience it the rest the 150 who do Experience it 30 times per week.

Then you have a frequency of like 45, 000 opportunities per week or something along that line. So you can begin to see how big [00:23:00] that situation is, and you can begin to allocate resources, begin to allocate, solution, services against that, that, that situation. Because you know, it's going to be profitable for you.

You know, that there's going to be enough activity associated with it.

Brian Briskey: And Dave, what you're describing is kind of a great thing in that it's a counter narrative to the most commonly held. model, which is a Tam, Sam, and Sam, right? You have this big giant pool. And the idea is you're picking smaller and smaller categorical chunks.

These are smaller stove pipes, so to speak. Right. And what you're describing because of frequency might appear a lot more like a long tail with a head and a longer tail. It's an exponential decay. And so the question for the strategist here is saying, okay, I know there is a head that would be what most of my competition is looking at as an ideal user, but where I should be expanding is moving up and down and picking in a different [00:24:00] threshold where I want to set the minimum frequency amount or the peak frequency amount to focus on.

And that may get you into what you could then consider, or normally it's called the adjacent. Use cases, these adjacent, we're gonna, instead of say adjacent markets, we can say adjacent use cases where with a few tweaks to the product or the service, you're now able to capture those users as well.

Dave Norton: Yeah, no, I like the idea of, thinking about it in terms of a long tail and, and I especially like the idea of how do you get out of the box you've created for yourself where there's a limited number of people who fit this demographic profile that you think you're going after. All right, so that's situational markets. Tell us about Your thoughts on scenario planning.

Brian Briskey: Yeah. So one of the ways that will be very helpful to think about with regard to getting outside the box or the single [00:25:00] stove pipe of a particular user is using scenario planning as in there is an event or a frequency, a moment.

That takes place. And there are variations of that moment. What the designer behind developing new products, features, and innovation can do is say, okay, how far out do I want to stretch the types of services and offerings and things like that to accommodate all those different frequencies. So I think it may show up here.

Yep. Okay. So in the first section, we're going to do with a four step process here. This is. Very boiled down high level. But essentially what you're looking to do is figure out what all those contextual factors are. So think again to the typical, attributes that you have for a user profile. But now we're having as a situational profile, there's an event that occurs.

Here are all the factors that might contribute to change the importance or the, that matter to the decision making process of a user. And then what we're looking to do is say, okay. Are these always set at a particular priority level? You know, is cost always the leading factor or is it access or ease of use or something like that?

And if they're not [00:26:00] always the case, then that might be critical. In other words, there's a split. Into a different scenario where under certain context, the situation may call for a different prioritization. So we all experienced this. When we go to the store, we have our favorite, let's say product that we're buying from the store.

We recognize the brand, the pricing is reasonable. We've already made that choice and we just need to repeat it. Every time we go back for weekly shopping, but wait a minute, we have relatives coming into town and we know that we need to, because we have a relative that's a brand snob or we want to go bulk because we have to accommodate more people.

Now I'm pushed out of my normal routine and I have to decide, okay, I'm going to do the bulk item. The brands are different. I have to redo all my heuristics and my decision making to make that choice. But what we're looking to do here is we're looking to generate a variety of these different, Instances and then author what that narrative would look like.

If we can articulate similar to a value proposition statement, we're going to go ahead and articulate what those factors [00:27:00] are, especially which ones are more fragile. In other words, they may be flipping one way or another in a given context and ultimately, at the end of the day, whether it's going to cause that person to go ahead and make that purchase.

So you can generate a menu of these. And choose how to prioritize from there, which ones you want to design for first, second, and third. You know, Burton, one of the things that you said in passing, but I want to re emphasize, is scenario planning's been around for a while. But instead of focusing on the who, we're focusing on the situation.

Dave Norton: You can use a lot of the same kinds of techniques, that maybe you've used historically, for the particular situation. Did I get that right?

Brian Briskey: Yes. In fact, so scenario planning's inception from the Rand Corporation to then being made famous by the Shell Oil Corporation often was used as a rigorous way to come up with what if scenarios [00:28:00] for macroeconomic forces, geopolitical forces, but the same methodology and techniques can be applied towards A theoretical person, but the different situations they find themselves in, because as we're seeing here, especially with context, oftentimes, you know, we could be completely separate in terms of our demographic data, but we may find ourselves in the same situation when it comes to relatives visiting.

And so our purchase decision process may be very similar. And so a smart strategic minded company can come up with what the scenarios are and say okay. Dave and O'Brien will find themselves in this particular scenario, and then they're going to decide very similar. That's where it's homogenous, as opposed to the fact that we're both, whatever, sized, aged, and income, because

Dave Norton: when the circumstances.

Are such most people are likely to behave the same way. Yep. A lot of people are at least. Right?

Brian Briskey: We are [00:29:00] more similar than we are different in a lot of ways.

Dave Norton: Exactly. Good point.

Brian Briskey: Tell us more. Okay. So what we want to do is go ahead and kind of walk through the process here. So I can give you add on.

So we're going to basically go through and identify the factors. The second step is to determine whether there are some trends behind those. Thirdly is, marking those. I like to use asterisks or something like an exclamation point to just simply notate which ones are going to be fragile. So in the case of the scenario I described, the general scenario, the default scenario of going to the store, making a specific purchase, let's say of a refried beans,

cause I'm going to have taco night. Everybody loves taco night. The thing that's fragile about that is the size of the portion. That's one of the biggest ones, because the number of people that I'm cooking for is the factor that changes. And most people are planning on making a certain item in mind for a certain number of people, you know, single use can, whatever the typical 30 ounce, whatever it is, size.

And [00:30:00] so to have the bigger bulk size or the pack of three, you know, different packaging options, for better storage. That requires thinking of, okay, what is the thing that's going to be changing in this other scenario? I think one of the interesting takeaways is a case study I came across once was people realizing that Play Doh, and this is important for strategists to think about, people at Play Doh thought that their competition was other toys.

But in reality, their competition was television. Because that was the activity that Play Doh replaced when parents were buying it and giving it to their kids. And so by doing this process of really better understanding the situations and scenarios that people are in, as opposed to just the people themselves, allows you to expand the definition of what really is competition and what you're, uh, in back to the jobs we've done example, what else is being hired.

And

Dave Norton: it creates a mindset within an organization that is more flexible, that [00:31:00] can adjust, right?

Brian Briskey: To when factors change. Exactly. And to simplify it for people, the Phoenix rule that pops up here. Right now we could assume that there is a status quo, right? That's everybody's doing their ideal segment, their ideal situation.

Let's say they're writing that up. If you're looking for what's to be fragile, instead of trying to go find a bunch of, you know, where are the signals in the noise, that's an expensive and challenging process. It takes a lot of skill to build that up. What you can do is postulate, okay, what if this factor broke?

So buying, the refried beans for taco night. We assume that it's going to be a taco night for two, right? For a small like couple. If they have three, five kids, does that break that assumption? Does that turn it on its head? So start with the default status quo and then challenge each individual one.

And that's how it's easiest to find which are the critical ones.

Dave Norton: I [00:32:00] love that.

Brian Briskey: Oh yes. And some great examples of two different ways things can be. So sometimes the status quo is going to hold and sometimes the status quo is going to be broken for sure. So in the case here of the top one, The story basically goes that the United States almost, almost did dual languages. We see that more now with Spanish and English going out in different documents, but there was almost a time where it had been English and German.

And there is, you know, a bunch of arm's share historians that think that maybe we would have As the United States had a different posture during World War One and so on. On the other end of the spectrum, you had a situation where, when Germany was advancing on their location for, what was Dunkirk, later became the miracle of Dunkirk because they missed an opportunity for when they could break what was going on there, which was the, basically break the siege.

So what's fascinating about it is determining whether these critical uncertainties go one way or the other. Allows you to challenge the status quo or make sure [00:33:00] that you haven't missed any particular opportunities that are going to go a certain way. I love it. So for those that love table formats, this is the way it looks when you have your factors lined up.

I particularly don't like the tables as much. I do visuals the other way, but for those that love it, here you go. You got your factors lined up, you got whether or not there are critical uncertainty, and that forces you basically to create a bunch of permutations down the line and come up with as many scenarios as you can.

Now, It's easy to generate a bunch of these. Some people have asked like, how many of these should I make? What if I have 12 factors and, you know, 12 critical uncertainties that, you know, use, use math, their factorial math, and you come up with a whole ton of these things. That's great for an exercise if you have the time and resources, but simply put our goal is to go ahead and crunch these down, to the maybe four that are the most extreme edges.

Okay. That are still plausible. So not preposterous, but still plausible. So visually what this looks like in terms [00:34:00] of a, like a decision tree or, a flow chart kind of graph, you've got all the factors and then there are these switch points. So if you go ahead and click again, It'll come up with where the critical uncertainty split.

So if you think of a multiverse kind of idea, you know, every time we make a choice, another universe is generated. This is what that looks like visually. So at the end of this one, we end up with a total of eight different ending scenarios theoretically, but we want to make sure that we kind of crunch those down into four just so it's easier and more manageable.

And so if it helps you just prioritize them, which ones seem the most plausible and whatever cuts off below the four mark, you could save them in your back pocket. And if you ever need to, you can go back and add more detail to them, but it's fine to just keep them there in the kind of like, kind of like Hollywood.

They have millions and millions of scripts just sitting in, well, used to be filing cabinets, half baked. And when they got the indication there was a time in the market to do it, they would go pull out this [00:35:00] kind of half baked script with a director and some actors that tapped, and they'd go figure out what to fill in for the rest of it, and then it was a full deal.

Dave Norton: From there, how is this, approach different from, like, when you think about the typical jury mapping exercise that people do? How is, scenario generation and critical, touch points, different. What are they? Are there anything, is there anything that's the same?

Brian Briskey: Yeah, that's a really good question.

So if you think about it from the traditional point of view, where someone will create a profile, they may create a couple of ideal, archetypes, and then they force feed them down this journey map, trying to explain all the different. touch points. And they might think of a few splits.

So if you think of it from like a user flow across a website, there might be that form of a Sankey diagram as it's called. But it's still force fitting a particular S and it forces people to create more and more stereotypical [00:36:00] behaviors. and leave others on the table, other kind of anomalies.

And so there's a lot that's missed. This approach here is more of a design thinking approach with a divergent convergent kind of attitude. So the ideal is you start with your default. Yes, but you create all this divergence. And like I mentioned earlier, the eight different scenarios. So all those are, let's say core seeds of scenarios at that point.

And then you take the top four that seem the most plausible. And then you run those through this next sort of step where you look at the, you know, in this case here, it's actually saying, okay, let's do some empathy and build that out further. So there's some tolerance between, in the same way, an innovation pipeline, a hundred concepts are made only 50 matriculate to the next level.

They get a little bit more worked on than only 20 make it, but then they're worked on further. And so with greater detail added, greater granularity, the number of survivors of those initial [00:37:00] states are able to make it to the very end. But because you've done that backlog of work, they're sitting there partially developed so that as assumptions are proven wrong, because real, the real decision is coming from the market.

The market will tell you if you're successful with your hypotheses or not, you can then just only have to go one step back to the previous and advance, uh, other things that you've previously developed. So it's like an innovation pipeline. Think of this as a series of those double diamonds moving the scenarios through to the user narratives and using the narratives through to, okay, these are what we're going to build for in this project,

Dave Norton: I love it.

Brian Briskey: So in this world here, what we're looking at is an example of how you kind of fill it in kind of like a Madlib in similar to the value proposition statement. We want to write this as simply put, and so that it's easy to communicate with others. This type of a product here or deliverable if you had let's say a handful of [00:38:00] these enables a user designer or strategist communicate with other members of the organization.

It puts guardrails around the strategic choices that need to be made further downstream, and it also creates a universal standardized language about, okay, A factor, which is affordability, if that is well defined, then everybody can get on the same page about what that means.

And then that's necessary for, you know, pricing choices later or when it's around convenience. Well, what does convenience mean? Is it this delivery channel? Is it a marketing channel? Is it onboarding? You know, what is that specifically? So we want to be very precise in our language. And fitting it inside a Madlib kind of statement like that helps us have a universal, way to describe it across the organization, especially for cross functional teams.

Dave Norton: So universal is another word for scalable. And, so here we have a perfect example of how you can actually scale and at the same time [00:39:00] address uncertainty, which I think is just

Brian Briskey: fantastic. Absolutely. So many people remember the back to the future to film and here we've got Marty McFly flying around on a hoverboard.

And now here's the reality. So it wasn't necessarily we got maglev and skateboards, we were able to adapt drone technology to catch up. So here's Tony Hawk trying out the world's first hoverboard and enjoying his experience with that. So the question then becomes, okay, what was the critical uncertainty here?

Here it was technology that caught up and was able to make the dreams come true. And so those scenarios were excellent in that regard. Now, here's an example, kind of a different direction where the culture is the thing that really changed. So. You know, meeting in different locations has always kind of been the thing, but because of the way societal norms have altered with regard to who is responsible for finding a partner and what other members of the family or group or society have sway over that has changed the way that we interact, [00:40:00] date and find true love and that sort of thing today.

And so sometimes it's not so much the technology. There is some in the background. So if you have dating websites and apps and that sort of thing, the style of how we altered, how we move has changed. So it's important when you're creating your initial factors to think about what is it that we think are going to be assumed to be the same.

All right. So for in this case, two people getting together, that will be consistent across all time and Memorial. Otherwise the species will end. But the thing that wasn't so much as like, okay, what amount of influence. Does the family have on whether it's arranged marriages with control over, the courting and courtship process, you know, asking for the father's hand in marriage to the more modern version where everybody's independent has their own, you know, for the most part has their own choice.

It changes the power dynamics quite extensively, and so that changes the situation at the end that most people are in, and therefore the products they would purchase can be part of that.

Dave Norton: [00:41:00] Love it.

Brian Briskey: Oh, and I always love to encourage, if people can get in the habit of using AI tools to do their thinking for them, Sometimes it's cognitively exhausting to sit there and use your imagination, just think of stuff.

So I would recommend, uh, if you do want to use AI, write yourself some prompts and use those, save those in a notepad file or wherever you like it, Notion, whatever the tool is you're using, and then throw that in, To a chat GPT just, leverage their creativity and then repackage it. So here's an example, because sometimes factors are hard to come up with to, you know, to think of, there is no one comprehensive list.

People have tried to build them, that it's who knows, maybe a Wikipedia one day we'll have something like that. But for now, because these generative AI tools theoretically have all the world's knowledge. more than Google, it said, it's possible to suss out what exactly are those contributing factors are.

Because again, there's a lot of pattern matching and recognition in these [00:42:00] systems now. And so they're able to pull out as you describe a situation, they may be able to create for you the standard one and then just ask for variations on variations and let it do the heavy lifting for you. I

Dave Norton: love that.

I love that it makes it so much more, possible for strategists to do this type of work by just jumping in, using generative AI to help you to think. Of course, you still have to do The work of doing scenario planning, but now we have these powerful tools that historically we just didn't have. So just really, really good stuff.

Well, this is the end of our webinar. We hope you've enjoyed it. If you want to dive deeper into case studies around things that we've done, I know Brian has case studies for his company. We had stone mantle. We have the mantle method and our [00:43:00] capabilities, around, many of the things that we've talked about today, as well as a lot of other topic areas.

Brian, thank you so much for being a part of our session today. Thanks to our listeners. We want to encourage you to start. looking at uncertainty as an opportunity and start skilling yourselves for uncertainty, for risk taking, for, identifying new ways of doing things, so that you don't get stuck.

Hit by something really big and difficult and with that we'll let you go. Thanks everyone. We'll talk to you soon Thank you. Dave. Thank you everyone