“Kill Your Company”

a very different kind of foresight workshop

Welcome to "Kill Your Company," an interactive session that challenges you to imagine one very specific future scenario — the demise of your organization ten years from now — and from this starting point, to look backward and reconstruct a plausible chain of changes and events that took place over the previous decade and eventually brought about its downfall.

Sounds masochistic, I know. But the point is to learn from this exercise what kind of external and internal developments could cause dramatic harm to your ability to operate successfully — and ultimately even survive. It’s more than a parlor game. “Kill Your Company” is a vitally important opportunity to identify your vulnerabilities and foresee, far in advance, how and where you need to build flexibility (and maybe some additional armor) into your organization.

The workshop kicks off with us transporting ourselves ten years into the future, where we see that your organization has just shut its doors for good. It’s an uncomfortable concept, and you need to suspend your belief in the invincibility of your company. The question we must now answer is…

What went wrong!?

Through a structured process of exploration and scenario building, we work backwards to visualize the developments and forces that acted upon you and led to this disastrous conclusion. To do this, we consider a number of possible factors, such as:

• What external forces — beyond your control — had a negative impact on your mission, capabilities, and effectiveness? How exactly did they weaken you?  What did you do to try to counteract them?

• What events, shocks, or disruptions took place that caused pain, and how did you react to them? Were they completely unexpected, or had there been warning signs? Did you spot these signs, or miss them?

• What competitors took business away from you, and how?  How did you react?

• Did your customers change over the past ten years? In what ways? Were they happy with you throughout the previous ten years, or did their feelings toward you change? When? Why?

• Within the organization, what did you do (or fail to do) that contributed to — maybe even accelerated — your downfall?  

• What, if anything, delivered the ultimate death blow… and finally killed the company? Was this coup de grâce avoidable? Could you have bought more time somehow, and would it have mattered?

A “Kill Your Company” workshop may sound like it’s all doom & gloom, but it’s actually very lively — often one “Aha!” moment after another. The insights it generates are extremely useful, revealing both strategic weaknesses and operational vulnerabilities that you should be addressing soon (or even now), and identifying potential challenges and pitfalls to watch out for and avoid.

All of this is with one goal in mind:

make sure this scenario never happens!

You could call this approach scenario planning in reverse. Instead of starting with the situation today and positing a portfolio of alternative futures or “scenarios” that could unfold (i.e. the conventional scenario planning process), “Kill Your Company” starts with an outcome — the disaster scenario — and works backwards to the present, proposing a chain of external developments and internal missteps that all combine to lethal effect.

Although it’s fiction, “Kill Your Company” helps you gain a unique perspective on the organization's strengths, and especially its weaknesses, i.e. critical areas that you need to shore up as well as challenges you need to prepare for, or avoid. Since participants are encouraged to consider what the organization can do differently to prevent this scenario from becoming a reality, one of the key benefits of the workshop is that it promotes a culture of continuous improvement.

Overall, "Kill Your Company" is a thought-provoking and highly beneficial workshop that will help you stay agile and adaptable in a world that’s full of uncertainties.

Interested in discussing this for your organization, or simply knowing more? Contact me using the form below, or e-mail me at wade@11changes.com. No obligation on your part!