The First Three Options Are Obvious. The Fourth Is Strategy.

Based on my recent inter­view with Kai­han Krip­pen­dorff, author of ​“Out­think the Com­pe­ti­tion” and ​“Prox­im­i­ty.” One in a series of three drawn from that conversation.

Lis­ten to the Arti­cle (4:13)

I’ve known Kai­han Krip­pen­dorff for over a decade, and I’ve always loved his work on strate­gic think­ing. He’s an author I keep com­ing back to, and his book Out­think the Com­pe­ti­tion still shapes how I think about strat­e­gy years after I first read it. So when I recent­ly sat down with him, the idea I most want­ed to get into was the one I find most use­ful: what he calls the Fourth Option.

Here’s the set­up. Every lead­er­ship team I’ve ever sat with can quite eas­i­ly gen­er­ate three options. Option A, Option B, Option C. They debate them, stress-test them, and even­tu­al­ly pick one.

The thing is, those first three are almost always the obvi­ous ones: the log­i­cal, lin­ear, like­ly moves that fol­low direct­ly from what the team already believes. And the best think­ing, the move that actu­al­ly changes the tra­jec­to­ry of a busi­ness, is usu­al­ly some­thing very different.

Kai­han calls that dif­fer­ent answer the Fourth Option, and the fact that teams only see three isn’t a prob­lem to fix so much as a strate­gic oppor­tu­ni­ty most of them walk right past. His argu­ment is straight­for­ward: the three options a team sur­faces aren’t the uni­verse of options, they’re just the ones that came up first. The Fourth Option, the one that actu­al­ly changes the tra­jec­to­ry, is almost nev­er in that orig­i­nal set.

The Fourth Option

Why Three Isn’t Enough

When a lead­er­ship team sits down to solve a strate­gic prob­lem, the options they gen­er­ate are shaped by what they already believe is pos­si­ble: their indus­try assump­tions, their exist­ing busi­ness mod­el, their past expe­ri­ence with what works.

That’s not a fail­ure of intel­li­gence, it’s sim­ply how human think­ing works. We pat­tern-match against what we know, and the catch is that the best com­pet­i­tive moves are usu­al­ly the ones that break the pat­tern every­one else is still following.

The Fourth Option is what it looks like to push through the log­i­cal, lin­ear, and like­ly to reach the strate­gic and coun­ter­in­tu­itive. It isn’t a com­pro­mise between the oth­er three. It’s a fun­da­men­tal­ly dif­fer­ent answer that becomes vis­i­ble only when you ques­tion the assump­tions baked into the orig­i­nal three.

Most com­pa­nies lose not because they’re out­worked, but because they’re out-thought.

What Find­ing It Actu­al­ly Looks Like

The com­pa­nies Kai­han has stud­ied that found their Fourth Option shared a con­sis­tent approach. They did­n’t just brain­storm hard­er, they changed the frame.

The start­ing ques­tion isn’t which of our options is best. It’s this: what are we tak­ing for grant­ed about how this mar­ket works? What con­straint are we treat­ing as per­ma­nent that might not be? Who is win­ning in a com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent indus­try with a sur­pris­ing­ly sim­i­lar under­ly­ing prob­lem, and what did they do?

Those ques­tions feel uncom­fort­able, and they should. The Fourth Option almost nev­er comes from a com­fort­able question.

I’ve seen this play out with clients over the years. In one instance, a CEO I worked with had plateaued after a strong run, and his team had three options on the table, all of them vari­a­tions on what they’d already tried. We pushed past those and even­tu­al­ly land­ed on a chan­nel part­ner­ship mod­el nobody on his team had seri­ous­ly con­sid­ered. With­in two years it was gen­er­at­ing 30% of new revenue.

He did­n’t need a bet­ter Option B. He need­ed to find Option D.

The Real Con­straint Is Courage, Not Creativity

Here’s what I’ve noticed: once a team actu­al­ly finds their Fourth Option, it usu­al­ly feels obvi­ous in hind­sight. The hard­er part isn’t see­ing it, it’s hav­ing the con­vic­tion to pur­sue it.

In The 4 Forces of Growth, I describe courage as one of the four forces, the thrust that moves a com­pa­ny for­ward when fear is pulling it back. The Fourth Option is exact­ly where those two forces col­lide. It looks uncon­ven­tion­al, the board might push back, and it means admit­ting the cur­rent play­book isn’t enough.

Most lead­er­ship teams see the move before they take it. The gap isn’t aware­ness. It’s will.

Watch the full inter­view with Kai­han below.

Chal­lenge

Take your most press­ing strate­gic chal­lenge and run it through this one ques­tion: what are we treat­ing as fixed that might not be? Give your team 20 min­utes to answer it seri­ous­ly before your next plan­ning ses­sion, and see what shows up.

Addi­tion­al Resources

Arti­cles

• Growth Isn’t What You Think It Is
• Design­ing for Dig­ni­ty: Why Ashi­ana Reimag­ined Senior Liv­ing in India
• Win­ning in a Chal­leng­ing, More Com­pet­i­tive Economy

Webi­nar

• The 4 Forces of Growth

Book: The 4 Forces of Growth 

• 4 minute Overview
• 45 Minute Webinar
• Buy on Amazon

Book: Scal­ing Up

• 45 Minute Webinar
• Arti­cle: 10 Years After Scal­ing Up: What I’ve Learned About Growth

Book: Your Oxy­gen Mast First

• Assess your­self
• Resilience Webi­nar

About Kai­han Krippendorff

Kai­han is the author of six books, includ­ing the best­sellers Dri­ving Inno­va­tion From With­in and Out­think the Com­pe­ti­tion, and most recent­ly Prox­im­i­ty. He’s the founder of Out­thinker, a glob­al think tank where chief strat­e­gy offi­cers work through their hard­est prob­lems, and he’s been named one of the world’s top 20 man­age­ment thinkers by Thinkers50 and Glob­al Gurus. He left McK­in­sey at 29 to write his first book because he believed there was a bet­ter way to think about strat­e­gy. His frame­works have since helped gen­er­ate over $3 bil­lion in new annu­al recur­ring rev­enue for the com­pa­nies he’s worked with.