Porters 4 Corners Analysis – it will help you to try and understand what other people, teams and organisations will do.
While it’s aimed at ‘competitors’ I would encourage it to be applied to situations where you want to understand both the causes of behaviour and also the action they are likely to do.
I’ve applied this many times, one example was around team planning where we had some overlap with partner teams. In order to work more effectively with those teams and to also develop our own team’s strategy I really wanted to consider the situation from their perspective:
- Drivers – what are they trying to achieve? what are their goals?
- Assumptions – what do those teams believe to be true?
- Current Strategy – how are they executing their work?
- Capabilities – what can they actually do? what are they really good at? what are they not so good at?
By taking these four elements/corners into account I was able to better understand my partner teams, understand their likely future strategy and develop my own team’s strategy.
Here is a link to read more.