Look at your market from unfamiliar angles.
<p>A practical exercise where participants apply a structured approach to exploring their market or business from angles they wouldn't normally use.</p>
Eyes on Your Market draws on several strategic frameworks that have proved particularly useful for helping leaders look at their markets with fresh eyes.
The first is Clayton Christensen's theory of disruptive innovation and the related concept of jobs-to-be-done. Christensen observed that established companies consistently miss disruptive threats because they focus on existing customers and existing needs, overlooking who is underserved and what those people are actually trying to accomplish. The question about underserved customers in this exercise is a direct application of that thinking: it pushes leaders to look at the edges of their market, where the most significant opportunities are often forming.
The second is W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne's Blue Ocean Strategy framework, which challenges the assumption that markets are fixed and competition is inevitable. Kim and Mauborgne argue that the most successful strategic moves involve finding uncontested space: markets and customer needs that existing players have overlooked or chosen not to serve. The question about what competitors are not doing is designed to surface exactly that kind of gap.
The question about assumptions draws on Roger Martin's work on strategy as a set of bets. Martin argues that every strategic position rests on assumptions about how the world works, and that those assumptions calcify into unexamined orthodoxies over time. Making them explicit, and treating them as strategic choices that could be revisited, is one of the most valuable things a strategy process can do.
The question about the simplest possible offer draws on minimum viable thinking from the lean startup tradition: what is the essential value being delivered, and what would remain if everything else were stripped away? This is often the most disruptive question of the four, because it forces leaders to confront the gap between the complexity of their current offering and the core value customers are actually paying for.
Participants leave with at least two or three specific observations about their market or business model that they had not previously considered, and a method they can use again.
Have people look hard at their own market and share what they notice, encouraging exchange across different sectors, then close with a specific commitment to follow one observation up during the week.
In a mixed group, encourage cross-pollination: people from different industries often find each other's observations more revealing than their own, so ask whether anyone from another sector sees something an insider might miss. That exchange is often where the most useful thinking happens. Then close with a specific instruction: take the most interesting observation from today and spend 30 minutes this week exploring it further, whether by talking to a customer, reading something you wouldn't normally read, or sitting with the question. That follow-through is what turns a session insight into a change in thinking.
Use Eyes on Your Market when a team has stopped seeing its market with fresh eyes and you want to surface hidden assumptions and overlooked opportunities. Structured questions push people to look from unfamiliar angles and leave with observations they had not considered.
Using this tool with a skilled facilitator means that discussions are focused, time is used efficiently, and the group moves toward consensus, making the session productive and impactful.
