How do we develop strategic options for our business?

Frame the strategic challenge as one question. Bring the people closest to the decision together to identify the central challenge or opportunity, then express it as a question with several possible answers. The B2B Reinvention approach starts with people inside the business confronting the choices they face, rather than beginning with a predetermined strategic direction.

The question gives the group a shared focus for exploration. Its purpose is to make the challenge concrete enough for participants to imagine competing answers and, later, devise tests that help distinguish between them. Keep the initial task focused on agreeing what needs answering, rather than choosing the answer before alternatives have been explored.

Develop alternatives and name their conditions for success. Generate different answers to the strategic question, then identify and select the conditions that would need to be true for the strongest possibilities to succeed. The B2B Reinvention methodology separates imagining possibilities from examining what would make them viable strategic choices.

Give participants space to use their experience and knowledge of the business while contending with its realities. The approach combines collaborative, human-centred creative work with supporting investigation to help identify and choose a strategic route. For each promising alternative, make the discussion explicit: what would have to be true for that direction to work? Naming those conditions gives the team something concrete to investigate before choosing.

Devise tests to inform the choice. Turn shortlisted possibilities into further questions, hypotheses and tests that help distinguish between the strongest options. The B2B Reinvention methodology calls for building and conducting tests to support a strategic choice, rather than treating the generation of ideas as the end of the process.

In the Carbon Tanzania workshop, the two founders and their partners explored possible answers to a single strategic question agreed in a separate session beforehand. The planned next move was to turn a shortlist into questions, hypotheses and tests that would enable an informed final decision. Use the same distinction: a workshop can open up possibilities and surface hopes and fears, while the final direction remains a choice to inform through testing.