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BLAST FROM THE PAST
Competitive Intelligence Blindspots
and Other Barriers to Adding Strategic Value
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By Jody Holtzman
Vice President
Research and Strategic Analysis
AARP |
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Competitive information, intelligence or market insight that adds strategic value does one thing: It supports and has impact on management decision-making, with the potential to positively influence a company’s market position and its ability to achieve and sustain competitive advantage and strategic business objectives.
Strategic value can be added by competitive intelligence that supports strategic or tactical decision-making. The information, intelligence, or insight can be as simple as a specific bit of information that is the missing piece of the decision-making puzzle, or it can be the product of significant human intelligence gathering, research, and analysis. The key is for those strategic and tactical decisions to be aligned with the company’s strategy and strategic business objectives.
CI Blindspots
Speak with almost any competitive intelligence practitioner and you will find that they have finally accepted the need to shine a light on senior management’s business blindspots: unchallenged assumptions, corporate myths, and corporate taboos. This is broadly viewed as a key responsibility for any intelligence professional.
While competitive intelligence managers speak about identifying management’s blindspots, CI managers themselves, unfortunately, all too often are the victims and propagators of their own blindspots. Overcoming CI blindspots is a key requirement if CI managers are to contribute on an on-going basis actionable competitive insight of strategic value.
Competitive intelligence blindspots typically come in four flavors:
- Philosophical
- Big picture
- Internal
- Opportunity
These CI blindspots hamper CI’s ability to contribute insights that help senior management steer the company to attain and sustain competitive advantage, which is the only justification for accruing the overhead cost of a CI function and staff. The result is a CI unit with a constrained ability to add strategic value.
Why CI Blindspots
To suggest that too many CI professionals have CI blindspots begs the question — why? Philosophical blindspots are consciously imposed constraints that proscribe you from venturing into the world of ‘so what.’ As such, they raise a legitimate debate regarding the proper role and responsibilities of the CI function. But there are some additional underlying commonalities.
One commonality underlying CI blindspots is a lack of understanding senior management’s competitive objectives, the strategy to achieve them, and the market and organizational assumptions that underlie those goals and strategy. An integrated understanding of these strategic factors provides an important lens through which to view the big picture, your company’s internal capabilities, strengths and weaknesses, and the business opportunities that flow from these factors. This senior management perspective is essential.
Another commonality are the analytic silos in which different pieces of the competitive puzzle are identified and evaluated, with competitive intelligence left to monitor individual competitors rather than the competitive landscape in a comprehensive manner. This is both an organizational and an analytic challenge.
Overlaying all of these factors are behavioral and psychological issues that are expressed in CI practitioner biases or arrogance. These may be displayed in a set of immovable assumptions about the strategies and intentions of various competitors. If we’re honest, we’ve all had the experience where we said something like, “I know that competitor so well, I can predict exactly what they’re going to do.” In these situations, evidence that supports our assumptions will be highly valued, whereas evidence that does not neatly fit our mental model is dismissed, often unconsciously.
Test Assumptions and Point of View
To overcome such biases and arrogance requires the forced use of analytic tools that help test assumptions and points of view, such as competing hypotheses analysis and implications wheel analysis. I say ‘forced use’ precisely because it is rare for anyone to purposely engage in an analytic exercise that questions their own thinking and assumptions. We might question someone else’s thinking and assumptions, but rarely our own. By making this a required exercise, the likelihood is greater that CI managers might actually see through the fog of their own competitive mental models.
One way to pull all of this together analytically — competitor profiles, a big-picture understanding of the market, a perspective on your own company’s internal capabilities and the business opportunities that flow from all this — is to use a visual dashboard and look at all of these factors as pieces of the competitive puzzle. First of all, remember that what it is you are competing for are customers. Why should customers buy products or services from your company and not your competitors? The focus on this question will provide strategic insight that is both actionable and contributes to your company’s competitive advantage.
The answer to this question will also come into focus as more pieces of the competitive puzzle are in place, although, it is unreasonable to assume that the puzzle will ever be fully completed. In fact, CI professionals must become comfortable with drawing conclusions under conditions of uncertainty. So, the more evidence you can marshal for competing hypotheses, viewpoints and conclusions, the higher the likelihood of success.
Competitive intelligence that adds strategic value contributes to the competitiveness of the company. It supports executive-level strategic and tactical decision-making, and contributes to achieving the company’s strategy and strengthening its competitive advantage.
But, to do so consistently over time, you must have the orientation of a Chief Strategy Officer. You have to be intellectually curious about the entire competitive landscape and all of the factors that drive it. And you must have a fact-based point of view as to how this competitive environment, current and future, will affect senior management’s market objectives and strategy. And you need to understand your own company’s ability to execute in the market.
CI needs to have all the data and an ability to synthesize and analyze it — an integrating mechanism that allows you to see both the trees and the strategic forest. And by confronting one’s own blindspots, CI managers will be more likely also to help senior management confront their own. Now, that’s adding strategic value. No small task. But nothing worth doing is.
Editor’s note: This article was excerpted from a longer article published in SCIP’s Competitive Intelligence Magazine. SCIP members can view the full article at
http://www.scip.org/Publications/CIMArticleDetail.cfm?ItemNumber=695
About the Author:
Jody Holtzman is Senior Vice President, Research and Strategic Analysis for AARP. Previously he was managing director of Strategy Dynamics Group, a strategy and competitive intelligence consulting firm specializing in helping clients achieve strategic business objectives by leveraging competitive differentiation. Prior to founding Strategy Dynamics Group, Jody was a Director of Global Strategy and Project Leader of the Market Intelligence Network of PricewaterhouseCoopers. He has an MA in international relations from the University of Chicago.
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