How to find disruptive strategy using the IDEAS process

Executive overview

Most strategy processes converge on the same options because teams share the same industry beliefs as their competitors. The breakthrough comes from deliberately seeking a "fourth option" — one that competitors have stopped looking for.

Kaihan Krippendorff's IDEAS process (Imagine, Dissect, Expand, Analyze, Sell) gives teams a repeatable method to generate and filter disruptive ideas. It combines ancient strategic patterns (the 36 Stratagems) with a structured facilitation sequence.

The core insight: disruptive ideas appear crazy at first — that's what makes them work.

Why conventional strategy fails

• Teams share belief structures with competitors; challenging a competitor requires challenging beliefs they hold
• Ideas get killed not by market analysis but by offhand assumptions ("the government would never allow that")
• The Miami port example: a logistics company rejected operating a seaport as impossible — a Middle Eastern firm did it a year later
• Founders often become the same idea-killers who once frustrated them
• "Key success factors" language signals a team has stopped searching for new options

The IDEAS process

• Imagine — step into the future; define the undesirable 5–10 year outcome on current path and the long-term ideal; the gap creates creative tension
• Dissect — use the eight P's to identify where to focus (Product, Price, Promotion, Placement, Positioning, Process, Physical experience, People)
• Expand — generate a large option set (aim for 30–100+ ideas, not 3–4); use the 36 Stratagems as provocations; include "illegal", "crazy", and "inappropriate" ideas to unlock adjacent thinking
• Analyze — sort ideas on a 2×2 matrix; tactics go to a monthly execution queue; apparent "winning moves" are often too obvious; sit longer with crazy ideas — they hold the real breakthroughs
• Sell — build internal alignment and buy-in for the resulting strategy

The eight P's (Dissect tool)

1. Product
2. Price
3. Promotion / marketing and sales
4. Placement / distribution
5. Positioning / branding
6. Process / operations
7. Physical experience / customer journey
8. People / hiring, structure, culture

Real-world examples

• Macmillan Publishing (Swoon Reads): self-published authors were declining traditional deals; applying "coordinate the uncoordinated" led to a crowd-sourced manuscript platform where community rates submissions by heat, tears, laughs, and thrills — turning a threat into a competitive advantage
• Window manufacturer: installers capped any single supplier at ~10% of revenue; solution was to acquire mom-and-pop installers, hire back the original owners to run them, then gain 100% product exclusivity; 10x growth in three years
• Logistics company (missed opportunity): rejected operating Miami port due to assumed regulatory barriers; a private Middle Eastern company did exactly that a year later

The Imagine step in depth

• Start with the "mess": the realistic undesirable future if nothing changes
• Then define the long-term ideal state (5–10 years)
• Do not set goals based on what you think is achievable — set them on what you want, then work backwards through Dissect and Expand
• Often the ideas generated exceed the original goal, prompting an upward revision
• Name the future vision in a single phrase: Cisco's "intelligent web", MasterCard's "world beyond cash"
• Mental time travel — imagining implications of trends (e.g., no personal cars → parking garages → housing conversion opportunities)

On expanding the idea set

• Most teams stop at 3–4 ideas; push for 30–100
• Imagination done first (with an impossible goal) makes expansion easier — the goal is too big to reach with obvious ideas
• Dissect forces teams to look in uncommon places beyond their habitual domains (usually product and promotion)
• "Crazy" ideas often trigger useful adjacent ideas: "kill their CEO" → "hire their CEO" → "hire their number two"

Analyze: why obvious winning moves fail

• Ideas that look like clear winning moves are visible to competitors too — they copy quickly and erode advantage
• Real breakthroughs look impossible at first
• Einstein: "It's not that I'm so smart, it's just that I stay with problems longer than others"
• Sit with the crazy-seeming ideas; work on how to convert them into executable moves
• Output: ~5 priority "rocks" for the 3-year plan

Scaling innovation beyond the founder

• 70% of the most transformative innovations of the last three decades came from employees, not entrepreneurs — cell phone, internet, email, MRIs, DNA sequencing
• Employee ideas get blocked by bureaucracy when they don't originate at the top
• Amazon Web Services came from Andy Jassy, not Bezos; Apple's scale came from Jobs creating a context for big ideas, not from his personal inventions
• Four drivers of internal innovation: leader behaviour, talent recruited and developed, organisational structures (flexibility), and cultural norms (proactivity, customer awareness, risk tolerance)