The advantage of looking sideways

Very different organisations often have remarkably similar problems.

Growth, income, loyalty, reaching new audiences, finding the right partners, deciding where to focus. The context varies enormously, but many of the underlying challenges don't.

When we're looking for answers, though, we tend to stay fairly close to home.

We look at competitors, sector benchmarks, best practice and case studies. All useful, and clearly you need to understand what's happening in your own market. If a whole sector is benchmarking against the same organisations, reading the same research and attending the same conferences, it's perhaps not surprising when everyone starts moving in roughly the same direction and new ideas become harder to find.

Look at the problem

There are far more organisations worth learning from once you stop worrying about whether they look like yours.

A charity wanting to build a longer-term relationship with supporters could learn from a membership business. An organisation looking to diversify its income might find useful ideas in a completely different business model. If you're struggling to reach a particular audience, look at who already has their attention and what they're doing with it.

In each case, the organisation you're learning from could operate in a completely different world while having dealt with something very close to the challenge you're facing.

It gives you a much bigger pool of ideas to work with too. There are only so many times you can look at the same five competitors and expect to discover something new.

Your customers are already looking sideways

Customers aren't making the same distinctions between sectors that organisations naturally do internally.

Their expectations are being shaped all the time, whether they're using their banking app, booking an appointment, buying something online, donating to a charity or contacting their local council.

If something is quick and simple in one part of our lives, we start to wonder why it takes seven clicks and a PDF form somewhere else. What felt perfectly acceptable a few years ago can quickly start to feel unnecessarily difficult.

An organisation can therefore be delivering one of the best experiences in its sector and still fall short of what its customers now consider normal. The organisation setting those expectations may not be a competitor, or even operate in remotely the same market.

What can you borrow?

Of course, looking elsewhere doesn't mean lifting an idea wholesale and hoping for the best.

Different economics, regulation, cultures and audiences matter. A start-up can do things a large regulated organisation can't, and an approach developed for retail won't necessarily survive first contact with a charity, school or public body.

The opportunity is to understand what sits behind an idea and decide whether any of it could be useful in your own context. What made it work? What did it make easier? Why did people respond to it? Was there an assumption behind the traditional approach that somebody was prepared to challenge?

Looking outside your immediate market can also test some of the assumptions that have become part of how an organisation operates. There will be very good reasons why certain things can't be done differently, alongside a few that, on closer inspection, boil down to we've always done it this way.

Look further sideways

Sector expertise matters. Knowing the market, its audiences and the realities of operating within it gives you depth and context, while looking more widely increases the range of ideas and experience you can draw on.

If you want to build loyalty, look at organisations that are brilliant at creating it. If you need new sources of income, look at who has successfully diversified theirs. If you're trying to reach a new audience, look at who already engages them.