Role playing by your staff among pretended competitors can give you large insights into what your staffing, skill, and learning vulnerabilities and opportunities are.
Competitive role playing is a planning activity that many businesses have found to be useful for understanding which paths offer more promise than others. Different individuals or teams assume that they are a particular company other than your own, and consider how best to outdo your enterprise.
In doing this work, it's important to consider both current and potential competitors. This work is also valuable for planning how to have an advantage in effectiveness for your firm.
What skills and incentives could you add that would create the most competitive differential in the future?
For example, in the on-line book selling business, this differential first appeared as Web-site design, but it quickly changed to include helping customers find books they would like but didn't yet know about. Later, providing an easy purchasing experience for non-book items started to become important. Over time, the required skills to excel will shift again, and that's why it's important for you to continually ask and answer this question.
What skills and incentives could you expand throughout your enterprise that would create the most competitive advantage?
Many groups are hamstrung by an elitist view that only a chosen few can know about and work on certain key issues. However, it's more likely to be true that the more people who work on the problem, the more potential insights they will develop.
In the case of on-line book selling, for example, anyone can buy a book on-line and have an opinion about what their unmet needs are, now and in the future. Teaching people how to elicit those opinions and use them to find simple, inexpensive solutions would be a great skill to have throughout any of the on-line book selling companies.
In light of the skills and incentives that would help your company prosper the most competitively, what learning environment would work best for you?
You will find it beneficial to modify your learning model to reflect the preferences of your people and needs of your operation. Have the people in your organization who need to learn read this article. Ask them to pay special attention to scenarios and competitive dimensions of those scenarios. Also, ask them to suggest how the learning process should work in your enterprise. Then track how you do with the learning approach, and modify it through measured experiments to better adapt the process to each person's particular learning style.
Copyright 2008 Donald W. Mitchell, All Rights Reserved
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