Supercharging Business Competitiveness with Offshore Sailing Races

In today’s fluid, elusive and unpredictable business context, technology has lowered competition barriers, unleashed entrepreneurship and boosted innovation.

But innovation doesn’t stop at the identification of new business opportunities. To turn them into successes, a new form of leadership based on an enhanced capability of anticipation, resilience, decision-making and an ultra-competitive value creation approach is required.

Competitiveness is the skill of developing, tuning or scaling business models to create more value than the competition.

Few environments present the same competitive dynamics and challenges, as offhore sailing races. Hence, they provide a wealth of insights and form a perfect training ground to boost business competitiveness.

Setting up an offshore racing project means having to deal with conflicting priorities of cost efficiency, safety and performance during the design of the boat and the race itself.

In that process, value has to be created for both the sponsor, as a customer, and for the skipper and his/her crew, as the end-users. And it has to be created competitively to be able to claim victory at the end of the race.

It is simple and subtle at the same time.

Like the development of any new product or service, offshore racing projects follow a few critical steps, which will lead to a race-ready boat and crew (Fig.1).

What will make the difference between a race-ready boat and victory contender are the skills with which the racing team will manage the diffferent stages of their project, by using similar approaches to what makes business projects successful: a relentless focus on value combined with techniques borrowed from design thinking, lean start-up and continuous improvement.

In particular the management of the trade-offs between value, scope and risks during the boat configuration will influence its competitiveness and the race strategy, designed around its intrinsic characteristics, unpredictable weather conditions and the opponents behaviour.

Such a strategy will be made of “what if” scenarios (anticipation), change management tactics (resilience) and reactions to race events (decision-making), which resemble uncertainties encountered in business.

For the above reasons, testing an organisation’s competitiveness through an immersion in offshore racing scenarios is a powerful way to beef up its strengths and address weaknesses, in a world where the ability to understand and redefine value is an essential ingredient of success.

To make this possible ALL4ONE consulting has developed the ALL4ONE TROPHY. This “serious game” simulating the preparation and participation in a sailing race around the world forms the backdrop for a value creation scenario. Design thinking, lean start-up and team efficiency value levers are explored, before being combined in the game to augment the competitiveness experience.

Try it and acquire the mindset, attitudes and behaviours, which will ensure you keep an edge or take the lead in this fast and constantly evolving world.

Ask for free demo or for more information: contact [email protected]

ALL4ONE consulting website