A very different kind of foresight workshop
Welcome to a highly unconventional exercise that challenges your leadership team to imagine how your company could fail…
…in order to see more clearly what to do now to prevent it:
"KILL YOUR COMPANY"
Imagine it's five years from now. Your company has just gone out of business.
What happened?
A new competitor outmaneuvered you? Once-loyal customers abandoned you? A technological breakthrough made your business model obsolete? New regulations undermined your profitability?
Or was it something more subtle? Like missed opportunities, changing circumstances, or warning signs that nobody noticed until it was too late?
Sometimes the best way to understand how your company can succeed is to explore how it could fail.
DON’T LET THIS HAPPEN TO YOU
Kill Your Company is a full-day, interactive foresight workshop in which your leadership team constructs plausible storylines detailing how the organization fails to survive the next five years.
Sounds masochistic, I know.
For sure, it’s an uncomfortable concept. But it’s powerful. To make it work, though, the first thing you need to do is suspend your belief in the invincibility of your company. Then we attack the question:
What went wrong!?
Working in small teams, you and your colleagues explore the external developments and internal decisions that might gradually undermine the company's competitive position, financial resilience, or ability to adapt.
You will consider questions such as:
How might competitors, customers, technologies, markets, or regulations change in ways that seriously threaten your business? Will you see these changes coming?
Which assumptions about your future could turn out to be dangerously wrong?
How might perfectly reasonable management decisions produce unintended consequences that end up hurting you?
What warning signs might you overlook, misunderstand, or dismiss outright?
At what point could your options become so limited that even a relatively modest setback proves fatal?
The objective is not to invent a spectacular disaster. It's to construct a set of believable stories in which one challenge leads to another, problems multiply, vulnerabilities accumulate, and the company's ability to respond gradually diminishes.
The stories and timelines need to be plausible. If participants don't believe something like this could actually happen, there's little to be learned from it.
MUCH MORE THAN A PARLOR GAME
Kill Your Company may sound like a depressing exercise in doom and gloom, but it's actually a lively, provocative experience (and often surprisingly entertaining).
You will challenge assumptions, confront uncomfortable possibilities, and realize that people who work in the same organization can imagine its future very differently.
The resulting discussions can generate one "Aha!" moment after another. But the real value comes when we bring the exercise back to the present, where you’re now able to answer this question:
What have you learned about your organization — and your strategic environment — that you didn't fully appreciate before?
Which vulnerabilities deserve more attention? Which decisions might you want to reconsider? What signposts should you be watching more closely? And what could you do today to make yourselves more resilient, more adaptable, and better prepared for an uncertain future?
The constructive idea behind this workshop is to turn an unsettling fictional future into valuable insights for the present.
WHY KILL YOUR COMPANY?
Because no organization is invulnerable.
Usually, companies that fail don’t do so because their managers are foolish or incompetent. Instead, they fail because key assumptions prove to be wrong, because the world changes faster than they can react, because yesterday's strengths become tomorrow's weaknesses, or because a series of individually defensible decisions produces harmful consequences nobody intended.
Kill Your Company is an opportunity to identify these kinds of potential weaknesses before they become actual problems, and foresee how and where you may need to build flexibility — and perhaps some additional armor — into your organization.
And unlike a conventional strategic planning exercise, it gives your leadership team permission to contemplate possibilities that might otherwise be too uncomfortable, unlikely, or politically awkward to discuss. (Which is kind of the whole point.)
It’s not a competition; nobody wins a prize for dreaming up the “best” way you meet your demise. Instead, everybody wins because you gain an understanding of how such a future could unfold — and of what you can do in the present to make sure it won’t.
WHO IS IT FOR?
Kill Your Company is designed for senior management teams, executive committees, and business-unit leadership groups willing to challenge their assumptions and explore the future from a radically different perspective.
The workshop takes one full day, typically with 10–20 participants. It is tailored to the organization and its particular business environment.
No special knowledge of scenario planning is required. Just curiosity, imagination, an open mind — and a willingness to contemplate the unthinkable.
Your company is still alive. Let's keep it that way.
Interested in exploring Kill Your Company for your organization? Get in touch for an informal conversation, with no obligation.