When asked to build a successful business, we prototype four. And make them compete.

This is from a series of short articles that aim to give people a sneak peek at some of Albion’s hard-won methodologies. It’s taken us many years to get these right enough to share. I hope you find this one useful.

Much of our work is focussed on either building a business from scratch, launching a new proposition from existing capability, or reimagining or reinvigorating the entire organisation.

Which is why we’ve developed a technique that we call ‘Possible Futures’ or ‘Competing Businesses’ to help us rapidly understand the different directions an organisation could take.

In each ‘future’ we sketch out what the business model, architecture, proposition, identity, and tonality would be if certain decisions were taken.

We’ve been tweaking the approach for the past two years. And fiddling with different assets for different budgets and business types.

I suspect that in time we might even settle on a name.

But for now, this is what we think works.

We spin up a multi-disciplinary team with just enough people to build the front end of a business from scratch. If you were to press me, it’s somewhere between four and six people, at an absolute push. The key thing is that you can cover off customer, commercial, product, and brand without getting bloated and slow.

You have to be absolutely militant about numbers.

This team then quickly mine the organisation for existing data and insight, which they qualify through in-depth interviews with key individuals. Don’t start with some expensive piece of research, this has almost always been conducted before, it’s just on a shelf gathering dust because no-one knows what to do with the bloody thing. Admittedly, you sometimes have to plug the gaps with some quality customer insight, but more often than not you can create a working model of an organisation’s commercials, capabilities, and customers in a week or two.

With this understanding the team work intensively in a dedicated room for 2–4 weeks, manipulating the business model, core capability, service layer, marketing system and customer set until we have ‘prototyped’ at least three competing businesses.

It is absolutely essential that this team is together in a single room. Natural light is preferable, but when we have too many projects in full flight, being together in a dedicated space beats being able to see the sun I’m afraid.

How deep we go into each area depends on the business type and stage we’re working to. So, when we built Ada, an AI powered healthcare business, we had to first create the hypothetical flow of the consumer application.

We could then use this framework as a baseline to adapt to different audiences and markets.

But when we helped Zopa transition from peer-to-peer loans company to customer-led bank, it was more important to strike the right balance between the future vision, and the more immediate and practical steps of getting there.

So in addition to designing the new brand, products, and marketing, we also ‘re-skinned’ the existing service in order to draw a line of sight between the current and future business. Demonstrating that the fundamentals are often in place, you just need to tweak the architecture and articulation of them in order to create something new.

Ultimately, ‘Competing Businesses’ helps us visualise the relationship and interdependency between purpose and proposition, brand and identity, product and service. Whilst also taking view on the implications for organisational structure and go-to-market.

So how do you decide which future to go with? Well, as you might expect we have validated each business against current and future customers to understand how compelling the proposition is. And we conduct loose commercial modelling to understand how viable the strategy is. But, ultimately, the business has to make a choice based on the available information.

So we present each ‘future’ to members of the c-suite, functional heads, and product owners. After which we give them a framework for scoring each aspect of the business, which they complete in secret in order to flush out the conflicting opinions on strategy that always exist at this level.

This data gives rise to a constructive debate about the consequences for brand, product and marketing in a way that everyone can contribute, despite differing levels of specialist knowledge.

Ultimately, what we’re hoping to achieve is clarity on the vision before we spend too much time and money creating solutions that might contain inherent flaws. But beyond this, we’re also trying to settle on the core executional elements before getting bogged down by the subjective opinions which tend to compromise creative processes that treat brand, product, or communications as discrete endeavours.

This is by no means an in-depth process, but if you’re looking to broadly crack the future of your business inside a month in an inclusive and collaborative way, we think this is a pretty good way of going about it.

If you need help visualising the future of your business, or if your teams need help working in new ways, designing new services, and unlocking new growth, then please get in touch.