The First Step to Customer Value Creation: Internal Awareness

When we talk about gaining “Insight”, we mean researching, openly discussing and reaching agreement on both internal and external knowledge of your company and it’s environment.

Developing internal knowledge involves first gaining a detailed understanding of the company’s history leading to the current state.  In other words: “Where are we right now and How did we get here?

The external knowledge is an understanding of what you and your company know about your customers, the market places you deal in and your competitors. To gain this knowledge it can ONLY follow the internal knowledge development process.  You gotta agree on where you are BEFORE you can plan a route to where you wish to go.

Value Creation Involves External Focus ONLY After Introspection

In many cases what we find are companies that have reacted to outside influences to become who they are today instead of developing and following both short and long term strategies to influence their own destiny. An in depth assessment of the company’s history and evolution can be very useful in identifying critical junctures that have shaped the nature of the current business.

Introspection Is Difficult And Often Emotional

Analysis of the actions your company took at these junctures, through the use of our WITH³ process, can highlight strengths, weaknesses and other key factors that influence and shape the business. This creates your internal awareness profile. This process can be straight forward but more often than not can also be difficult due to changes in personnel, conflicting opinions and a general difficulty with recollecting the past, especially in the areas of poor performance or failure.

These are the critical areas of introspection essential to your future success with our process. No matter how painful this process becomes, the information gained can be critical to your company’s future success. The more open and frank your organization is about its past, the more knowledgeable we all become in identifying areas for action for the future.

We’ll discuss the external situation analysis in our next post  “What do we really know about the outside world or do we really know what we think we know?”

As always your comments are welcome.

If you want to explore these concepts further, please call Gary Gauthier at 248-672-1943  or Dave Gingrich at 248-446-2626.