Sometime is 2019 we were consulted to facilitate a strategy retreat for a tower building company whose main source of business was leasing space on their towers to TELCOS. Our mandate was to help their management team develop competence for innovation so they can in turn create blue oceans in their industry.
To set the tone for entire retreat, we asked them 2 questions.
The first question we asked them was: What is core purpose of your business?
Their answer to that question revealed their very first limitation.
They defined themselves by what they were doing – not what they could do.
They said they build towers.
When we asked what their towers did, they went to another specific limitation.
They said they lease their towers to TELCOS for masts.
So when they looked at their business they basically saw two things, towers and TELCOS. They had real estate that allowed (in their minds) only one type of structure. And in that sense, they had only one product. Whatever happens to that product will happen to their company.
Their error was in thinking that the demand for their service will continue ad infinitum. But they were what we call an adjunct. A value chain in a lucrative industry. They were a conduit. Their only value was in the fact that they could house TELCO masts. They weren’t TELCOS themselves. They were a value chain for TELCOS. If something changed (as it later did) in how TELCOS deliver network to their final consumers, then their entire business model would crumble. They would have towers but no tenants.
Our first task was to help them see what this purpose allows them to do.
Organisations don’t live from their products, they live from their purpose.
The real question is not what more can our products do, it is: what more products does our purpose allows us to create.
What is not yet apparent in the market but our purpose allows us to do it?
This is what we called Deep probe 1
(By the time we had explored these realities with this client, they had found major use for their towers in two industries outside telcos (DEFENSE & AGRICULTURE)
