Clear Thinking Case Study
of the Month 

Classic Examples of Clear or Unclear Thinking by top management teams to help your teams develop their thinking skills and avoid costly thinking errors

"Petrol Panic, and How long is three months? UK Government thinking challenges"  Mch-Apr 2012

Government thinking has taken a battering lately with a string of problems emerging, many self-inflicted, culminating in disastrous local election results. The petrol panic was quickly followed by Theresa May’s debacle over Abu Qatada’s deportation due to a ‘misunderstanding’ about the meaning of “three months”. We examine the thinking behind the thinking. ... read more

"How safe are cruise ships - after Costa Concordia?"  Jan-Feb 2012

On 13th January the Carnival-owned cruise ship Costa Concordia hit rocks and partially sank off the Italian coast with the loss of life of 32 passengers and crew. The Italian captain reportedly deviated from the scheduled course and sailed too close to the island of Giglio.  We extract valuable lessons for the Business and Safety Thinking on very large cruise ships. ... read more

"Should Marketing merge with Sales? Hot topic gets Marketers steamed up"  December 2011

This is a critical organisation design and culture change story ... and a classic customer-focus and teamworking story. The Chartered Institute of Marketing (CIM) has suggested that organisations should strongly consider merging their usually separate departments of Marketing and Sales ("Fusion"). The idea is that there needs to be much closer alignment between these two functions. However, this ‘merger’ will not be easy and may not be well received by either function.  ... read more

"What is Design? Who can explain this key, but vague, concept?"  November 2011

Design is a word that everybody uses, yet few people – even the design ‘experts’ - can define it or explain what it means. We believe that this vagueness of thinking is one of the key reasons why so many projects, plans, products, and communications go wrong. How else do you account for Prisoner vans being built too large to get through the gates of UK courts (just one of many farcical design errors reported in the media)?  ... read more 

“Hewlett Packard and Netflix get painful lesson in Customer-Focused Strategic Change Communications”  August - September 2011

Both HP and Netflix received similar bruising lessons in understanding how customers and investors could react to a sudden change in business strategy. In HP’s case the 25% collapse in share value was enough to cost the CEO his job. Netflix was a bit more alert and (fairly) quickly announced a u-turn. ... but it was the way they communicated their change of strategy that caused them massive problems. Customer Thinking was clearly lacking. ... read more

"The Customer's Viewpoint on Marketing and Selling"  July 2011

We visited the Marketing Live trade exhibition and seminars at Olympia, and as usual at exhibitions, found numerous examples of the difficulty marketers and sales people have in seeing their communications from the customer’s perspective. We saw, and heard, a series of ‘obvious’ communications errors, even by the ‘experts’ in marketing. But none of the exhibitors were aware of these errors, until we pointed them out. ... read more

“Britain’s schools get lessons in Concept Thinking from Singapore”  June 2011

The UK comes a horrifying 28th in the international league of pupil achievement in maths. Shanghai is top, Singapore second. But now something is being done to address the problem – we’re going to teach our children to THINK, which means learning about concepts in maths, science, and English. Concept Thinking. That’s what the Asian ‘tigers’ are good at ... read more

"Bye Bye PPI? - another Financial Services mis-selling 'scandal' - Business versus Customer Thinking"  May 2011

PPI, Payment Protection Insurance, became the latest mis-selling ‘scandal’ to hit media headlines after Lloyds Banking Group broke ranks and agreed to compensate customers at a cost of £3.2billion. Major rivals Barclays, RBS, and HSBC are expected to follow with provisions ranging from £1bn down to £270m. This Story is about Business Thinking taken to excess ... read more

"The Continuous Creative Process - Pixar's incredible run of success"  April 2011

 Pixar Animation Studios has produced an amazing string of 11 blockbuster animation films such as Toy Story, A Bug’s Life, and Finding Nemo. This extraordinary success rate is not down to luck, it stems from an unusual culture and organisation design that fosters creativity – continuously ... and could work for any organisation. ... read more

"The Joy of Chess Problems - great for developing your Thinking Skills"  March 2011

Research has established that playing chess, and especially solving chess problems, significantly improves thinking skills. We identify which thinking skills, and how they are developed. We also describe a chess problem solving process equally valuable for resolving business problems.  ... read more

"Caution - Women on Board. Diversity of Thinking?"  February 2011

Vince Cable, the Business Secretary, commissioned a review to investigate why there are so few women on boards of UK companies. He wanted to pre-empt the potential introduction of targets by the EU. We analyse this key issue of 'Balanced Boards - diversity of Thinking'.  ... read more

“Steve Jobs – highly successful Whole-Brained Leader”  December 2010 – January 2011

Apple Inc co-founder Steve Jobs is in the news because of concerns that his illness may affect Apple’s business performance. We analysed the stories ... he is Whole-Brained, Clear Thinking, with a range of Leadership Styles ... read more

“Delusional Thinking - England's 'humiliating' World Cup bid”  November 2010

England's bid to host the 2018 World Cup suffered a shock 'humiliating' defeat when the winners of the 2018 and 2022 tournament-host competition were announced. The 2018 competition 'favourites' collected only one vote out of 22. We analyse what went wrong. … read more

See full list of Case Studies on the News page

The Business Experience

SEE OUR UNIQUE RESEARCH BELOW
ON
CLEAR THINKING

Our extensive research into Why Strategies, Plans, Projects, Innovations, and Communications
GO WRONG
points to one prime cause - THINKING ERRORS made by planning teams. Identifiable - and avoidable - Thinking Errors ... often 'obvious', in hindsight.

In one £billion corporate disaster story we identified 21 costly Thinking Errors that could have been avoided had the planning teams been
'thinking in the right way'.

Our Clear Thinking model and Thinking Styles (ways of thinking) are based on the Herrmann Whole Brain Thinking model.

The main reasons why Communications (especially Advertising) go wrong are:
- their inherent 'iffyness'
- the unreliability of pre-tests
- people think they can judge their own communications.
So we developed AdQA Communications Quality Assurance - the world's first QA System for testing and improving the effectiveness of any form of visual, written, or spoken Communications, including Selling.

Our research, analysis, and experience working for/with multinational corporations, also identified a wide range of factors that affect Business/Team/People's Performance. Many are not obvious, or are little understood, or poorly implemented.

The well-known Balanced Business Scorecard hasn't helped one major company - its share price has hardly improved in over 25 years!

The really important factors affecting performance are
clear thinking on strategy, leadership, oversight (controls), innovation, customer focus, learning, change, flexibility, ...
The wrong culture almost toppled one FT-100 business.

Many of these factors interact and every organisation is different. We offer a highly insightful team/group workshop to enable clients to investigate which factors have the greatest impact and generate ideas for improving performance. From a single team to right across the organisation.