Before tackling the current topic on strategic thinking exercises, I have to admit something: In my capstone MBA strategy class, we ran a business simulation throughout the semester. Upon its completion, my partner and I won an award for our performance. We garnered the "Understock Award" for stocking out of product more than any other team.
Yes, I had created a spreadsheet-based model to perform what-if analysis and forecast our business levels. But my tendency to plan for surviving the downside of a situation led us to repeatedly under-forecast our sales volume in the simulation. Thus we invariably experienced more demand than we had product to satisfy.
Flash forward to a strategy session we designed and facilitated for Literacy Kansas City. The organization is a nonprofit advancing literacy for teens and adults in the Kansas City region through direct services, advocacy, and collaboration.
While we were identifying critical success factors for a new Literacy Kansas City program launch, one of the board members announced she was going to play the "Positive Devil's Advocate" role. By "Positive Devil's Advocate," she meant she wanted to plan for overwhelming success with the new program. Would the organization be ready to handle a dramatically higher enrollment than expectations?
Playing the Positive Devil's Advocate in Strategic Thinking Exercises
This role came up once before in a strategy session. Based on my award-winning tendency to plan for the worst and not for wild success, however, we haven't developed specific Positive Devil’s Advocate roles in current exercises or designed new strategic thinking exercises focused on dealing with overwhelming success.
We'll fix that and incorporate the "Positive Devil's Advocate” role into strategic thinking exercises. It will a bit of a flip to the Black Swan exercise we've talked about previously. We'll also incorporate this role into other exercises, making sure we identify a person to push thinking on wild success wherever it's appropriate. – Mike Brown
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