Games can help in visualizing your organization’s business models & competitors’ business models and help in generating more useful insights. It can help in addressing unsatisfied requirements or identifying unknown customer needs and build new business models around them. Now, all your players can work together to understand the existing business model and also find out how their business model may become obsolete in the upcoming year and thereby, map out future business models.

Numerous business strategy canvases are available. If you are a business leader, you may have already heard about Business Model Canvas (developed by Osterwalder, Pigneur & al. 2010)[i] or Blue Ocean Strategy Canvas (developed by Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgneor) and many other such canvases[ii]. I am not going to explain those canvases here as your team might already be using some of those canvases for building strategy. Still, I think that one could make use of the multiplayer experience based on multiple canvases and host on cloud and make those available to everyone in your organization. Those players can be congregated to various teams playing the game deployed in various instances. It can capture inputs from all players, which could be showcased and analyzed in a virtual canvas poster. 

The business canvas would be for developing a broad framework of strategy and understanding employee players in the context of what is required to transform the workplace. Or it could be about developing strategy and understanding why customers buy certain products & services; in the context of what is needed to transform marketing. The use of a strategy canvas for core functions with more substantial employee participation would create a more inclusive strategy formation. This broad employee engagement would also lay the foundation for a successful implementation of the transformation initiative.

Adobe took the bold decision of putting employee and customer experience under the same organizational umbrella.[iii] Adobe launched a program called ‘Experience-a-thon’ to put employees in their customers’ shoes to get instant feedback from customer groups, not from an employee’s perspective but as an actual customer. Combining employee engagement with customer experience strategy has resulted in transforming Adobe to move from being a physical software provider to cloud-based solution provider. Are companies ready to make bold decisions to involve all its employees in contributing to building the transformation strategy & the ground-up strategy? 

Successful ground-up transformations

Hasbro, the toy and game company realized that instead of focusing on children, it really should be marketing to their parents, who make the purchase decisions. The company leveraged data and harnessed the power of storytelling to better understand and connect to its customers and thereby, recommend relevant toys and games to parents by creating a frictionless experience. Investments in transformation strategies can be significant; however, the returns can be realized in a rapid succession of strategy execution. Hasbro increased the Ad spend by 1100%; the focus on digital marketing and data harvesting has helped Hasbro to increase its sales by $1 billion.[iv]

BestBuy transitioned its strategy from mail marketing to an entirely new digital strategy focusing on advising customers, instead of just selling products to them. It resulted in phenomenal business results and profits. In 2012, the stock price of BestBuy was US$23.70, and as of Jan 2020, it reached US$89.[v]

Key Takeaways
Set up the cloud-based multiplayer canvas to engage all of your employees in collecting valuable inputs; to build a strategy on how to transform & prepare for successful ground up transformation.

[i] http://businessmodelalchemist.com/2010/01/mapping-business-models-a-knowledge-game.html

[ii] https://www.blueoceanstrategy.com/

[iii] https://www2.deloitte.com/us/en/insights/topics/emerging-technologies/mit-smr-deloitte-digital-transformation-strategy.html

[iv] https://www.forbes.com/sites/blakemorgan/2019/07/21/7-examples-of-how-digital-transformation-impacted-business-performance/#2706911c51bb

[v] https://www.forbes.com/sites/blakemorgan/2019/07/21/7-examples-of-how-digital-transformation-impacted-business-performance/#911a27951bbe