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Click on each of the 15 icons at the bottom to see a visual of each of the tools.

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Blue Ocean Strategy Tools & Frameworks | Blue Ocean Strategy

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With blue ocean strategy tools and frameworks, you can create blue oceans of uncontested market space in an opportunity-maximizing, risk-minimizing way.

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Methods and examples included on this website. Try pairing with this image (for any age group): https://artgallery.yale.edu/collections/objects/138261

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I had a black and white picture of a poor miner's room on the overhead projector. In the picture the walls were covered with cardboard and the room was sparsely furnished. I was doing professional development for teachers and I did not give them any background information about the picture. I asked for some opinions about what they saw, then I asked the teachers, "Do you think a man or a woman lives here?" In unison they responded, "A man!" That was very interesting to me so I asked a follow-up question, "What makes you say that?" Although the response had been unanimous, the reasoning was varied. One teacher said, "You can tell it's a man's room because there aren't any decorations - a woman would put something nice in there even if she were poor." Another teacher said, "That rocking chair doesn't look very feminine." When I asked for more detail she said, "It looks big, and there is no cushion or anything on it." Yet another teacher answered, "I think if it were a woman's room there would be something to remind her of family - either a picture or there would be children's items in the room." The teachers had noticed details that I hadn't and had also drawn on their own beliefs to bring a deeper perspective to the picture.

This is the Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS) method. It is a very simple activity designed to build students' background knowledge and develop thinking skills that use detail to enhance understanding. Many educators have used this method as a precursor to working on a literary passage because the thinking skills used to analyze artwork can be transferred to literature as well. The Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS) method was created by Abigail Housen, a cognitive psychologist in the Harvard Graduate School of Education. VTS is targeted at developing creativity and thinking skills. It also presents a very effective method for tapping into students' background knowledge.

Method

1. The teacher selects an interesting picture or painting, one that relates to the topic of the story to be read, in this case the picture above.

2. A copy of this picture is placed on the overhead projector. There are many sources of pictures on the Internet, including museum and library websites. (See the Hot Links section).

3. The students are asked, "Please look at the picture silently for a minute and think about what you see. What's going on in the picture?"

4. After a minute the teacher opens up the question to the room, "What do you see in the picture?" The students' responses often start out with the obvious - "There's a man walking a dog and another man riding a bike. The picture looks old. I think it was taken in a city."

5. When a student offers a qualitative statement, the teacher asks for more information. "You said the picture looks old. What makes you say that?"

The students justify their answers by providing evidence from the picture. They may say, "It's in black and white, and the cars in the back all look like they were made a long time ago."

6. Next the teacher asks students to share differing opinions and provide justification. One student may say, "The man on the bike is wearing a suit. I think he is going to work on his bike because he doesn't have a car." The teacher then asks, "Does everyone agree? Is that why this man is riding his bike in a suit?" Another student might say, "I don't think so. I think he just likes riding his bike. Maybe they didn't make clothes for riding a bike then."

7. The discussion goes on until students have shared all they can about the picture.

8. The teacher summarizes what the students said. "So, after looking at this picture we think that, maybe relatives - who lived a long time ago. We can tell this because of what they are wearing and because the picture is black and white."

9. For the next activity, the teacher can either have the students write a few sentences about what they discovered, or read a text related to the picture.

Reading

Let's say students are reading about New York in the 1900s. The teacher points out that the same creativity and way of thinking that the students used to look at the picture will be used to understand the reading.

When students share about their reading, the teacher asks the same kind of VTS questions about the text. "What is happening? How do you know that?" The teacher makes a point of showing the students how sharing their ideas about the story are the same as when they discussed the picture earlier.

Writing

A variation of VTS was offered as a Bright Idea from Gemma De Vita, a teacher from Fulton County Schools in Atlanta, Georgia. In her Picture Description activity, she makes copies of an interesting picture and has the students glue it to a page in their notebook. The students write three to six sentences or questions about the picture and then share them. This allows the students to have a picture book with their own notes to remind them of what they are learning and thinking. Gemma says she likes to use the Picture Description activity in her classroom because, "Once I thought maybe I would try another strategy to introduce a selection, and my students asked where the picture was. They said they love doing Picture Preview and would I please do it more. They said, 'It's fun!' It also helps with all Language Arts domains: Speaking, Listening, Writing, and Reading. Students can also work at their own levels and challenge themselves as they hear higher level questions that they can use as models after their next reading selection. It also helps them compose questions, which they often need practice with."

The Visual Thinking Strategies method offers an easy, interactive and non-threatening way to get students thinking. There are no right or wrong answers, and anything that students believe can be justified by details in the picture. This opens up students' minds to the fact that, even in reading, people come away with different impressions and thoughts. These should be shared and discussed to further develop understanding for everyone. To me - this is the richest lesson of all!
Picture Description
Here you can find a short picture description lesson that highlights relevant grammar structures and provides lists of words that are useful for talking and writing about pictures.
National Geographic Photography
This site offers many intriguing photos, including a photo of the day, news photos, photo gallery, and short video clips. These can be useful for supporting content instruction, fostering dialogue with emerging English speakers, and creating writing prompts.
Minneapolis Institute of Arts: Art Adventures
The Minneapolis Institute of Arts' Art Adventure program is an example of a collaborative effort between the museum and the public schools. The program's volunteers visit classrooms with art posters related to a specific theme, such as animals or celebrations. The site offers samples of some of the posters used.

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Visual Thinking Strategies for Improved Comprehension

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I had a black and white picture of a poor miner's room on the overhead projector. In the picture the walls were covered with cardboard and the room was sparsely furnished. I was doing professional development for teachers and I did not give them any background information about the picture.

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How do we better prepare students to develop better cognitive flexibility?

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How do we better prepare students to develop better cognitive flexibility?

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OpenCourseWare (OCW) is selected curricula from outstanding American universities and  other institutes of learning, offered free of charge and delivered via the Internet.

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Independent OpenCourseWare Studies - IOCS

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The official site of IOCS - a framework for bringing opencourseware studies to secondary students.

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What are the future jobs we are preparing children for in our schools today?

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What are the future jobs we are preparing children for in our schools today?

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Audit your organization today. Are you focused on 2015 skills or 2020 skills?

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The Best Leaders See Things That Others Don't. Art Can Help.

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The Best Leaders See Things That Others Don't. Art Can Help.

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Harvard Business Review Article

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Executive Summary

"The real act of discovery," French novelist Marcel Proust wrote, "consists not in finding new lands but in seeing with new eyes." Today the most successful companies don't just outcompete their rivals. They redefine the terms of competition by embracing one-of-a-kind ideas in a world of copycat thinking. Which means, almost by definition, that the best leaders see things that other leaders don't see. That's not as easy as it sounds, especially for leaders who have spent years at the same company, or in the same industry, or as part of the same discipline. Without ever intending it, experienced leaders often allow what they know to limit what they can imagine going forward. Which is why, to summon the spirit of Proust, it's so important for leaders to see their company and industry with fresh eyes - which means looking at their work in new ways. And art, it turns out, can be an important tool to change how leaders see their work.

andrew nguyen/hbr staff/the new york public library

I don't often start essays about leadership with insights from French novelists, but in this case it seems appropriate. "The real act of discovery," Marcel Proust wrote, "consists not in finding new lands but in seeing with new eyes." Today the most successful companies don't just outcompete their rivals. They redefine the terms of competition by embracing one-of-a-kind ideas in a world of copycat thinking. Which means, almost by definition, that the best leaders see things that other leaders don't see.

That's not as easy as it sounds, especially for leaders who have spent years at the same company, or in the same industry, or as part of the same discipline. Without ever intending it, experienced leaders often allow what they know to limit what they can imagine going forward; their knowledge can actually get in the way of innovation. Which is why, to summon the spirit of Proust, it's so important for leaders to see their company and industry with fresh eyes - which means looking at their work in new ways.

Art, it turns out, can be an important tool to change how leaders see their work. One fun exercise to encourage experienced leaders to challenge established ways of seeing took place recently in Providence, at the Rhode Island School of Design Museum, in an annual event called Cops and Docs. The program, which has been running for 10 years, gathers highly accomplished medical professionals and highly trained police officers, people who in their jobs have to quickly make sense of the world around them, size up problems, and devise effective solutions to complex (often life-threatening) problems. Over the course of the evening, mixed groups of cops and docs looked at paintings, sculptures, and other works of art, and shared their answers to a pretty basic question: What do you see?

Needless to say, what participants saw was a function of the jobs they did and the experiences they'd had - which explains why different people reached such different conclusions about the same pieces. Here's how one article summarized what participants took away: "Make careful observation a habit. Learn to describe what you see. Allow a different interpretation of the observation. Understand that one scene can have several plausible explanations. Avoid tunnel vision. Exercise creative thinking skills." Those are great lessons for doctors and detectives - not to mention executives, entrepreneurs, and leaders in any field.

As it turns out, Cops and Docs is not the only program that uses art as way to move accomplished leaders out of their comfort zones. Amy E. Herman, a consultant and educator trained as a lawyer and an art historian, has created an intriguing program, called The Art of Perception, that gets to the heart of the all-important difference between looking and seeing. In it, she takes police detectives, FBI agents, even high-ranking Secret Service and CIA executives to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Frick Collection, and other well-known museums and galleries. These grizzled observers of crime and terrorism, trained in certain ways to look for clues about murders and identify threats, instead set their sights on works by Picasso, Caravaggio, Edward Hopper, and other masters. The exercise is "not about looking at art," Herman explains to the participants. "It's about talking about what you see."

Or, much of the time, what you don't see. Time after time, skilled leaders miss critical elements of a painting that send an important message, overlook signposts in a scene that speak to what's taking place, or can't figure out how to describe what's right in front of them. "Don't be afraid to change your perspective," she urges her participants, who report that the new ways of seeing that they develop through these museum visits have opened their eyes to new ways of evaluating evidence on the job. "In New York, the extraordinary is ordinary to us, so in training we're always looking to become even more aware as observers," a deputy chief explained in one of many approving accounts of the program.

Amy Herman's program, like Cops and Docs, is an elegant departure from the tired routines of leadership, a fun and clever use of art to sharpen skills and clear heads. But there are simpler and more "businesslike" ways to achieve the same eye-opening ends. Years ago, in Fast Company, we profiled a highly creative leader at Royal Dutch/Shell named Steve Miller. One of his techniques was to assemble diverse teams of colleagues - longtime veterans, corporate newcomers, marketers, technologists - put them on buses, and tour various locations across Europe, where his business unit was based. They'd visit Shell operations, customer sites, and other settings. "Then we got back on the buses and talked about what we'd seen," Miller explained. " We all wrote down our impressions, and when we got back, we went over what we'd learned from the visits."

Needless to say, what people saw was a function of who they were and what they specialized in. And what everybody learned together was far richer and deeper than what any individual would have learned on their own. That's the real point, of course, whether the subject being observed is a timeless piece of art or a customer facility. For leaders who want to see with new eyes, remember that how you look at something shapes what you see - and you see more creatively when you look at the world with other leaders who have different backgrounds and experiences.

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The Best Leaders See Things That Others Don't. Art Can Help.

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Executive Summary "The real act of discovery," French novelist Marcel Proust wrote, "consists not in finding new lands but in seeing with new eyes." Today the most successful companies don't just outcompete their rivals. They redefine the terms of competition by embracing one-of-a-kind ideas in a world of copycat thinking.

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See Raci Whitepaper Post from earlier today

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Think Sesame Street

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By W. Chan Kim & Renee Mauborgne Nondisruptive creation is where one's gain doesn't have to come at the expense of others. Very often entrepreneurs associate market creation with disruption or creative destruction, focusing on displacing existing players and markets by bringing in a superior product. However our research shows that many new markets have been created without disrupting existing ones.
If you have children and live in any one of 147 countries around the world, from the United States, to Afghanistan, to Germany, Japan, or Yemen, you have heard of Sesame Street. Big Bird, Elmo, Ernie, and Bert are just a few of the lovable Muppets that teach preschool children how to count, name their colors and shapes, and recognize the letters of the alphabet. And the best part is that children have so much fun watching the program they don't even realize how much they're learning. But parents do, which is why they love it too. It's the antithesis of what many people associate with education. It seduces and amuses as it educates the very young.

Sesame Street didn't disrupt any prior market for early childhood education. It didn't destroy and replace preschools, or libraries, or parents reading bedtime stories to their children. Rather, Sesame Street opened up a new value-cost frontier that unlocked the new market of preschool edutainment that, for the most part, had never existed before. In contrast to "disruptive creation," Sesame Street is the result of what we call "nondisruptive creation," as it created new market space without disrupting an existing market.

Now put children aside and turn to men. Many men's lives were revolutionized through Pfizer's market-creating move of Viagra. But did Viagra disrupt another market? Again, the answer is no. It was nondisruptive creation. By alleviating erectile dysfunction, Viagra solved a prevalent and previously unaddressed problem and took the world by storm. Demand for it rapidly grew into a multibillion-dollar business, creating a new market space of lifestyle drugs.

Now think of the more than 3 billion people who live on only a few dollars a day. Here, too, nondisruptive creation stepped in to solve an unaddressed problem: the lack of access to capital that was driving the poverty cycle. In 1983, Grameen Bank began offering microloans without requiring collateral, enabling people to start businesses or engage in agriculture and climb up the income ladder while paying off a small debt. This strategic move created the new market of microfinance without replacing any other market. Until then, conventional banks had simply ignored the poor, whom they deemed unsuitable as borrowers. Microfinance has since ballooned into a multibillion-dollar industry with plenty of room for future growth. While climbing, it still reaches less than 20 percent of the potential new market, which today is served by both nonprofit and for-profit organizations around the world.

Online dating, health clubs, crowdfunding, ringtones, and routers, switches, and network devices are just some of the myriad multibillion-dollar industries that have been created in the last few decades through nondisruptive creation. Today, in fact, the fastest-growing profession in the United States, second only to information technology, is based on nondisruptive creation. It's life coaching. Just 25 years ago, the industry did not exist. Now it boasts annual revenues north of US$2 billion. The advent and growth of the life-coaching industry have not come at the expense of any existing industry. Tens of thousands of new coaching jobs have been created without destroying any other jobs. Rather, the industry has created new demand, as people flock to life coaches to become more effective in both their personal and professional lives.

Disruption is a powerful way to create growth. But thinking only about disruption leaves a lot of opportunities off the table. One is to solve a brand-new problem and capture a brand-new opportunity-and that leads to nondisruptive creation. The opportunities for nondisruptive creation loom large, and entrepreneurs would be unwise not to take them into account as well.

[See Blue Ocean Shift, Part One, The Fundamentals of Market-Creating Strategy]
This short summary is a snapshot of the fundamentals of market-creating strategy detailed in Blue Ocean Shift. Be sure to check out the book for guidance on how to implement each step and use the tools of Blue Ocean Shift, including what works and what doesn't, so you can achieve success.

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What is nondisruptive creation? | Blue Ocean Shift

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By W. Chan Kim & Renee Mauborgne Nondisruptive creation is where one's gain doesn't have to come at the expense of others. Very often entrepreneurs associate market creation with disruption or creative destruction, focusing on displacing existing players and markets by bringing in a superior product.

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The three main attributes associated with agile learning are tolerance of ambiguity, intellectual curiosity and emotional intelligence... Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS) is a research-based, well-established methodology that enhances observation, communication, critical thinking, and collaborative skills, and increases your comfort with ambiguity

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Awhile back, I wrote about the importance of an . Agile learners are better able to work through complex problems, drive innovation and increase their bottom line. The three main attributes associated with agile mindset and how to improve yours agile learning are tolerance of ambiguity, intellectual curiosity and emotional intelligence, according to The Korn Ferry Institute,

Imagine my delight when I came across a methodology to improve agile learning. Interestingly, the methodology was not developed in the business world but in the art world. Yet, it has been applied to sectors as far afield as medicine. Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS) is a research-based, well-established methodology that enhances observation, communication, critical thinking, and collaborative skills, and increases your comfort with ambiguity.

Medical schools are using this technique to improve the diagnostic process. "Too often, doctors stop looking after they find the first fracture," said Dabney Hailey of the Hailey Group , who uses the methodology with entrepreneurial and corporate clients. "The second fracture is a frequently missed diagnosis. Business people, too, benefit enormously from learning to stay in a process of inquiry rather than jumping too quickly to a right answer and premature decision making."

It's not difficult to see the importance of these skills to entrepreneurs.

Keen observation skills allow you to track what's happening in the marketplace, monitor the changing needs of customers and understand how products and services are different and better than the competition.

Critical thinking solves complex problems by gathering and assessing relevant information, developing well-reasoned conclusions and solutions while being to alternatives.

Communication skill ensures that you can explain your product's competitive advantage to a customer, its market potential to an investor or negotiate a contract with a vendor.

Entrepreneurs do best when they share information and ideas, seek out alternative opinions and include the best ideas of others in their own thinking.

Comfort with vague or contradictory information allows decision making when things are uncertain.

I attended a workshop in which Hailey, a former museum curator, demonstrated the VTS methodology. We looked at Kerry James Marshall's untitled painting of a black woman holding a palette in front of a canvas . I experienced the depth of the discussion and the impact of other people's insights on my thinking.

The same techniques that Hailey used to engage my group in a long and deep discussion about Marshall's painting can be used by entrepreneurs to develop solutions to problems they face and take advantage of opportunities.

Using the methodology is also a great employee-engagement tactic. "Often, employees don't feel heard and respected," said Hailey. "By using VTS, employees stay engaged and feel they are making a contribution." By having people with diverse vantage points involved in the decision, outcomes are improved and innovation seeded.

Looking deeply, inquiring openly, listening attentively, reasoning with evidence, recognizing multiple perspectives, integrating failure, and reflecting with intention can improve business decision making, feed innovation and transform entrepreneurial culture.

Are you ready to become agile?

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How Discussing Art Improves Innovation And The Bottom Line

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Awhile back, I wrote about the importance of an . Agile learners are better able to work through complex problems, drive innovation and increase their bottom line. The three main attributes associated with agile mindset and how to improve yours agile learning are tolerance of ambiguity, intellectual curiosity and emotional intelligence, according to The Korn Ferry Institute, Imagine my delight when I came across a methodology to improve agile learning.

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Principal's reflections on the latest reports of the jobs market for our current students - a push for cognitive flexibility.

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Principal's reflections on the latest reports of the jobs market for our current students - a push for cognitive flexibility.

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Cognitive flexibility is the ability to shift our thoughts and adapt our behavior to the changing environment. In other words, it’s one’s ability to disengage from a previous task and respond effectively to a new one. It’s a faculty that most of us take for granted, yet an essential skill to navigate life.

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A few years back the World Economic Forum came out with an article titled The 10 skills you need to thrive in the Fourth Industrial Revolution. The opening two paragraphs sum up the point of the piece nicely:

By 2020, the Fourth Industrial Revolution will have brought us advanced robotics and autonomous transport, artificial intelligence and machine learning, advanced materials, biotechnology, and genomics.

These developments will transform the way we live, and the way we work. Some jobs will disappear, others will grow and jobs that don't even exist today will become commonplace. What is certain is that the future workforce will need to align its skillset to keep pace.

The image above shows the skills that will be most in demand in 2020 and probably well beyond. After reading this article I was extremely interested in how schools and educators provide opportunities for learners to not only acquire these skills but also illustrate competence in how they are applied. Some of the skills and how leaners can demonstrate competency are self-explanatory. Others are not. This led me to focus on one skill in particular that crept onto the list at number 10 - cognitive flexibility. What does this skill entail? Below is a good definition from the University of Miami:

Cognitive flexibility is the ability to shift our thoughts and adapt our behavior to the changing environment. In other words, it's one's ability to disengage from a previous task and respond effectively to a new one. It's a faculty that most of us take for granted, yet an essential skill to navigate life.

Spiro & Jehn (1990, P. 65) provide another look at the skill:

By cognitive flexibility, we mean the ability to spontaneously restructure one's knowledge, in many ways, in adaptive response to radically changing situational demands.

Both definitions seamlessly align with Quad D learning based on the Rigor Relevance Framework as described below:

Students have the competence to think in complex ways and to apply their knowledge and skills they have acquired. Even when confronted with perplexing unknowns, students are able to use extensive knowledge and skill to create solutions and take action that further develops their skills and knowledge.

In my mind, cognitive flexibility might be the most important skill on the list as it incorporates so many of the others in some form or another. Below are a few ideas and strategies on how to help learners develop this important skill:

1. Design learning activities the support divergent thinking where learners demonstrate understanding in creative and non-conventional ways.

2. Empower students to identify a solution and then come up with a workable solution in a makerspace.

3. Allow students to explore a topic of interest in OpenCourseware and then demonstrate what they have learned in non-traditional ways (see IOCS).

4. Implement personalized learning opportunities where students think critically, openly explore, and then do using their own intuitive ideas to learn in powerful ways.

5. Engage students in a real-world application in unanticipated situations where they use their knowledge to tackle problems that have more than one solution.

6. Provide pathways for students to transfer learning to a new context.

How we prepare our learners for the new world of work has to be a uniform focus for all schools. The key to future-proofing education and learning is to get kids to think by engaging them in tasks that develop cognitive flexibility.

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Cognitive Flexibility: Paving the Way For Learner Success

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A few years back the World Economic Forum came out with an article titled The 10 skills you need to thrive in the Fourth Industrial Revolution. The opening two paragraphs sum up the point of the piece nicely: By 2020, the Fourth Industrial Revolution will have brought us advanced robotics and autonomous transport, artificial intelligence and machine learning, advanced materials, biotechnology, and genomics.

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Blog post - 10 minute read

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How do blue ocean strategists see new opportunities where others see only red oceans of declining profits and slow growth? They don't get taken in by what everyone else takes for granted. They embrace a perspective that helps them challenge long-held assumptions and recognize the artificial boundaries we unknowingly impose upon ourselves. Their perspective is different from the market-competing logic that dominates the way many business executives and entrepreneurs think.
To find out if you are a blue ocean strategist, ask yourself the following questions about your own perspective. Consider how each guiding principle can help you see opportunities where before only constraints were visible.
1. Do you take industry conditions as given? Or do you reshape them in your favor?
When executives develop strategy, they nearly always begin by analyzing the environment: Is the industry growing or shrinking? Is customer demand up or down? Most executives build their strategies based on such assessments. In other words, structure shapes strategy.

When faced with intense competition, declining demand and increasing costs, blue ocean strategists do not take industry practices as a given. What they recognize, and what most of us forget, is that while the industry conditions exist, individual firms created them. Industry boundaries are not fixed.

A blue ocean strategist doesn't let the structure of the industry shape his or her strategy because, just as individual firms created existing industry conditions, individual firms can shape them too. From Apple in the consumer electronics industry to Cirque du Soleil in the circus industry, or even DryBar which created the "only-blowouts" marketspace in US hair salons, the examples are endless.

While shared industry logic may help you make sense of the world, it dramatically restricts your creative thinking and understanding of what is possible and profitable.
2. Do you try to beat the competition? Or do you make the competition irrelevant?
Most organizations are stuck in the trap of competing. Having accepted the industry structure as a given, executives benchmark their rivals and focus on outperforming them to achieve a competitive advantage. The irony is that focusing on building a competitive advantage leads to imitative, not innovative, approaches to the market.

Put more simply, the more you focus on benchmarking and outpacing the competition, the more your strategy will look like the competition's. Is this something your company does all too often?

But let's take a step back. Every winning company, by definition, has a competitive advantage. So, a competitive advantage is a good thing. The problem is that when managers are urged to secure a competitive advantage, they automatically look to the competition. Rather than looking at what buyers value, managers end up defining the strategy based on the competition.

A blue ocean strategist, on the other hand, doesn't focus on benchmarking or imitating competitors, or on trying to improve on their best practices. Instead, they focus on how to make the competition irrelevant.

Ask yourself- what would it take to win over the mass of buyers, even with no marketing? You want to create an offering so compelling that anyone who sees or tries it can't help but rave about it. Stop looking at what industries are competing on and start looking at what the mass of buyers actually values.
3. Do you focus on creating and capturing new demand? Or do you focus on fighting over existing customers?
Customer satisfaction and understanding customer needs are a priority for any organization. Most organizations regularly monitor customer satisfaction scores through customer satisfaction surveys, for example. This can lead to finer segmentation and greater customization to meet your customers' specialized needs.

A blue ocean strategist, however, doesn't just focus on satisfying existing customers. Why? Because focusing on existing customers keeps a company anchored in the red ocean of existing market space. In most industries, organizations converge around a common definition of who their customers are. This prevents companies from seeing the wider potential of new demand outside their industry that they could tap into. In many industries, existing customers are just a drop in the bucket, compared with all the noncustomers who can be reached through market-creating strategies.

Instead of fighting to win a greater percentage of existing customers, blue ocean strategists recognize that extra demand is out there, waiting to be unlocked. By looking to noncustomers, they begin to uncover the pain points their industry imposes on buyers and why many refuse its offerings.

Ask yourself - do your existing customers keep you focused on what is, instead of what could be? Go further. Find out who your noncustomers are, and why they don't buy into your industry.
4. Do you simultaneously pursue differentiation and low cost? Or do you make a value-cost trade-off?
A blue ocean strategist doesn't choose between pursuing differentiation or low cost. If you truly have a blue ocean mindset, you do both.

A differentiation strategy often amounts to little more than adding bells and whistles to the industry's current approach. On the other hand, pursuing a low-cost strategy often means cutting back the industry's existing competing factors without creating anything new to stand apart.

To offer buyers a quantum leap in value and break the value-cost trade-off, blue ocean strategists focus as much on what to eliminate and reduce as they do on what to raise and create.

How about you? Do you act on the assumption that, to achieve differentiation, you need to spend more? Do you assume that lowering costs means compromising on the distinctive value you can offer?

Each of these guidelines to reframe your thinking is further detailed in Blue Ocean Shift with concrete examples of how two organizations - one a nonprofit B2C, and the other a classic for-profit B2B - applied them to shift from red to blue. We hope you feel encouraged to start shifting your perspective and seeing brand new opportunities where you thought there were none.

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The Mind of a Blue Ocean Strategist | Blue Ocean Shift

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How do blue ocean strategists see new opportunities where others see only red oceans of declining profits and growth? They don't get taken in by what everyone else takes for granted. They embrace a perspective that helps them challenge long-held assumptions.

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RACI - roles and teams, a white paper on teaming and role clarification

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RACI - roles and teams, a white paper on teaming and role clarification

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Blue Ocean Strategy