Consider these problems your business may face:

• You want to re-energize a key division whose sales growth is flagging, but believe the strategies that got you where you are won’t get you where you need to go.
• A rival is mounting a serious challenge in your market, with an innovative product or service that threatens your business.
• You compete in a highly volatile industry, and need to get ahead of the market.
• You want to significantly raise the bar on your customer experience.

In each case, the solution starts with reimagining your business to achieve breakthrough insights – insights that will take your strategic, product development and marketing decisions in the most profitable directions.

This challenge calls for creative approaches:

• Getting ahead of what consumers really want and need.
• Asking provocative questions that lead to transformational solutions.
• Engaging your people deliver them.

Even when you don’t see a problem, you can use these approaches.

As an example, the King County Library System, one of the largest and most admired libraries in the U.S., long has enjoyed almost impossibly high customer satisfaction ratings. But its leaders believed they could do even more to deliver a better customer experience and do it more consistently. Their provocative question became: What would "Library Heaven" look like in 20 years, and what should they do today to get there? 

A comprehensive internal and external discovery process helped create a strategic blueprint that the library system has implemented successfully for more than nine years. As a result of its reimagining, the library has:

• Optimized its service approach to encourage librarians to step out from behind their desks to engage patrons at “points of puzzlement."
• Built or renovated all 48 branches and laid them out to facilitate browsing so patrons can more easily discover materials of potential interest.
• Introduced self-checkout and other DIY improvements.
• Accelerated its investment in e-books.
• Changed key policies involving cell phone use and late fees.  
  

Today, the system continues to rank as one of the top libraries in the U.S. and now leads the nation in e-book lending.

Whether you are an established market leader or fighting for your place in the market, the ability to periodically reimagine and reinvent your business is a key factor for success.