Profiling the ideal player

After using The attractiveness/advantage matrix (GE/McKinsey) and The growth/share matrix (BCG) to choose where to compete, the next question is what capabilities success in those markets may require. Profiling the ideal player turns several plausible futures into a practical view of the capabilities a strong competitor would need.

When to use it

• Use it after selecting priority product–market segments and before assessing the organisation’s capability gaps.

• Revisit it when technology, regulation, customer expectations or competitive structure could materially change the basis of success.

• Use a workshop when diverse perspectives will improve the scenarios; the brainstorming element is helpful but not essential.

Origins

Profiling the ideal player is a practical synthesis of established scenario-planning, key-success-factor and capability-analysis methods rather than a model with one recognised inventor. It links alternative views of the future to the characteristics of a high-performing competitor, then carries the capabilities that remain important across those futures into strategic planning.

What it is

Somerset Maugham warned that perfection can be dull, but imagining a near-ideal competitor remains instructive. The purpose is not to claim that your organisation can or should become perfect. It is to ask what a highly capable player in your industry might look like three to five years from now, under more than one credible market scenario.

The resulting profile is a reference point. It helps management distinguish robust capabilities worth building now from specialised capabilities that depend on one uncertain future.

How to use it

The process has three stages:

Envisioning future scenarios

Assessing key success factors in each scenario

Identifying common capabilities.

The method begins by constructing plausible pictures of the future marketplace. For each scenario, describe the ideal player’s key success factors and the organisational capabilities needed to deliver them. Compare the scenarios to find capabilities that recur in all or most of them. Those recurring requirements become candidate target capabilities for Identifying the capability gap.

Profiling the ideal player

Envision future scenarios

Define the market, strategic horizon and focal decision. Then consider how competition, customer expectations, technology, regulation, channels and the economics of the industry could evolve.

Generate a varied but manageable set of internally coherent scenarios. Go beyond the base case without drifting into fantasy: include outcomes that are less expected yet sufficiently plausible to affect present choices. A useful test is to imagine looking back from the end of the planning horizon and ask whether the development would be surprising but still credible.

Select two to four scenarios and give each a memorable, neutral name. Describe the causal path to each future, not just its end state, so that the organisation can later watch for early signals.

Assess KSFs in each scenario

Start from the key success factors already developed in Deriving key success factors, then reassess them against the customer needs and competitive conditions in each future.

A factor may become more important and receive greater weight in one scenario, lose importance in another, or remain stable across several. Other factors may be entirely new. Record the retained, added and reweighted factors for every scenario. The ideal player for a scenario is the feasible organisation that would perform most strongly against that scenario’s complete set of factors.

Keep the ratings evidence-based. Separate customer requirements from internal capabilities, state the assumptions behind each score and avoid designing an “ideal” player whose attributes are mutually incompatible or economically impossible.

Identify common capabilities

Translate each scenario’s success factors into the capabilities needed to deliver them, then compare the lists.

Some capabilities will matter in only one future, some in several and a small number may matter in every scenario. Retain the original base-case factors from Deriving key success factors as an important reference because the most likely future still deserves weight. New scenario-specific requirements add resilience; they should not automatically displace the core.

A capability that appears in only one scenario may still be strategically important, especially if the scenario would be severe or the capability takes a long time to build. Conversely, the organisation cannot prepare fully for every eventuality. Evaluate recurring relevance, lead time, reversibility, cost and downside exposure before choosing what to develop.

The final profile should identify a small set of robust target capabilities, several contingent capabilities to monitor and the signals that would trigger investment. The next step is to compare those requirements with the organisation’s current strengths and decide which gaps to close.

Top practical tip

Build the scenarios first and describe the ideal player independently in each one. Only then compare capability lists. This reduces the temptation to make every future justify the strategy or capabilities management already prefers.

Top pitfall

Do not confuse creativity with speculation unconstrained by evidence. Give workshops a clear focal question, time horizon and plausibility test, and reject both trivial variations of the base case and imaginative stories that cannot inform a decision.

Further reading

• Schoemaker, P.J.H. (nineteen ninety-five). “Scenario Planning: A Tool for Strategic Thinking.” Sloan Management Review.
• Ohmae, K. (nineteen eighty-two). The Mind of the Strategist. McGraw-Hill.