Why strategic imagination is key for future business success

Organizations must strategically leverage their imagination of the future to recalibrate their business today.

For modern businesses, the ability to think forward — to see beyond “what is” and envision “what could be” — is crucial. Disruptive strategy looks to deliver today’s products and services in a very different way. The EY-Parthenon Disruptive Strategy team helps leaders achieve this by deploying their strategic imagination capabilities, helping to explore bold innovation opportunities and fundamentally reimagine business models.

Data from the EY-Parthenon CEO Outlook Survey shows that winning organizations employ this forward-facing perspective, proactively investing in emerging technologies to build an innovation edge, while simultaneously harnessing and nurturing their capacity to imagine. 

To do so, businesses must envision, discern and develop innovative solutions to unknown future problems, with managers who can explore all areas of their task environment and exploit this knowledge in a focused and goal-oriented way. 

Bridging 'what is' and 'what could be' through imagination

Pairing exploratory and exploitative capabilities allows important organizational trade-offs to be accounted for while creating a foundation for a sustainable competitive advantage — the “unknown advantage” firms often struggle to capitalize on due to a lack of imagination and an excess of misaligned priorities.

Leveraging this unknown advantage involves two key actions:

1.  Fostering deliberate strategic imagination: Simple optimization of existing processes is no longer enough; neither is relying on past data or established ways of doing things. Firms must be prepared to invest in and create space for imaginative thinking that allows them to go beyond the status quo.
2.  Establishing human-machine co-creation processes: Creative potential and capacity for envisioning new futures should be supported and elevated by the effective use of machine intelligence to allow for the rapid prototyping, testing and recalibrating of ideas.

EY-Parthenon Disruptive Strategy teams help our clients improve the impact of their technology investments and inorganic acquisitions by identifying and quantifying new value pools through strategic uncertainty advantage. We help enable them to reimagine their business models to refocus their profit and loss statements and shape their future through the smart use of disruptive and emerging technology.

Four steps leaders can take now to foster imagination in their organizations

Forward-thinking leaders should think about what imagination looks like in their organization and how they can create this capacity to imagine in meaningful and practical ways. Take the example of Rivada Networks, a company rethinking wireless connectivity. EY-Parthenon teams have worked with Rivada to realize the outputs of their imagination, by supporting the development of a decentralized, peer-to-peer marketplace for connectivity that transforms network capacity from a static commodity to a dynamic, globally accessible resource.

The following four steps offer a methodology that helps enable this kind of meaningful vision:

Together, these steps function as the first phase of a broader, holistic model — a (re)imagination cycle — in which the imaginative outputs feed a cyclical process of planning, design and execution.

In turn, lessons from the execution stage feed back into the cycle to help refine the imaginative vision, and so on. The approach can be applied to various operational areas to facilitate novel thinking and the potential future-oriented gains that come from it. 

Our Disruptive Strategy team aligns your business goals with EY-Parthenon's extensive insights into the future of your industry. This helps empower you to navigate today’s challenges and develop innovative, forward-looking business strategies designed to harness disruption and emerging technology.

With thanks to additional contributor Dr Sebastian Kortmann, Associate Professor of Strategy and Innovation, Director of the Amsterdam MBA, who helped develop this thinking.