How this ancient philosophy helps your business
In a previous post we’ve explained what the Co-Existence of Contradictions (CEOC) is, and why it’s a useful paradigm through which startup leaders should view their business right now. If you haven’t read it, I recommend that you do so to give the following article some more context. In this post, I would like to give a few examples to how the philosophy of CEOC is helping us as startup leaders, and how it upgrades business performance and success.
A / CEOC dramatically improves our business diagnosis
The CEOC helps us to see reality in a clearer, more accurate way. It helps to capture the complexity of life and simplify it into actionable outputs. In the field of strategy, seeing things clearly is the foremost condition required to diagnose a situation as close to reality as possible. Once we’ve achieved a good diagnosis, then, and only then, can we make the right decisions and act accordingly.
Among other stages in the business development process, the 3P Model applies the CEOC during the business diagnosis phase. By doing that, it brings us closer to realise the ‘real’ situation of our business. For example, entrepreneurs who follow the 3P Model go through quarterly diagnosis routines for their business. In these routines they use the 3P Canvas that helps us not only to differentiate between Product, People, and Playground analyses, but - and here comes the CEOC contribution – it also asks us to take into account both ‘positive’ elements of each one of these 3 Ps, as well as the ‘less positive’ ones. In the 3P Canvas, these two sides of our business picture are called ‘to maintain’ and ‘to improve’ parts.
This might sound trivial. However, you’ll be surprised to hear how much this ability, to ‘objectively’ consider both sides, is so unnatural to us. For many reasons, we have an inherited tendency to highlight the ‘to maintain’ elements of our business, and to ignore the stuff that needs to improve. We’re not talking about situations in which we’re pitching, or writing our investment-decks - I’m talking about the internal work we carry out to diagnose our business for the purpose of developing it. We just naturally tend to ignore the ‘to improve’ side of it. It doesn’t feel very nice and it seems incompatible with our ‘Instagramable’ reality, which constantly leads us to believe that we must live in a continuous picture-perfect state.
The problem is that we can’t improve, nor develop, if we can’t consider and face up to the ‘to improves’ in our business. While it’s true that, as business leaders, confronting the less-positive sides of our products is not the most pleasant thing to experience at first, it’s an essential long-term habit that drastically upgrades our business observation (and thus, our business decision-making).
The 3P Canvas is used by teams for quarterly business review and planning and is considering both ‘positive’ and ‘less positive’ aspects of the company.
B / The CEOC increases our entrepreneurial confidence
Not bringing up the elements which we know are needed to improve, might indeed reduce unpleasant feelings -for the short term. For the longer term however, it’s a confidence killer. There’s no point in ignoring things which we are (consciously or unconsciously) aware of, as they will eventually pop up. Also, we might feel immediate relief while focusing only on the positive parts of our business, but the truth is that the feelings involved in ‘hiding’ the less-positive elemnts are not contributing to our self-esteem and entrepreneurial courage.
Once we are ‘forced’, a s a matter of routine, to start observing and pragmatically taking care of things that are needed to improve (in our products, in ourselves and in the way we’re functioning in our playground) a kind of a miracle happens: we’re not only contributing to our business performance, but we also cure some unconfident parts in us as entrepreneurs.
Lat but not least, on the team level - startup leaders who implement the CEOC in their companies as work culture, also benefit from a lighter, yet more secure, working atmosphere and a more efficient work flow.
C / IT develops one of the most important 21st-century skills
The CEOC is embedded in the 3P Model in a manner that makes it simple and effortless to use. It helps startup leaders to benefit just by following the 3P Model methodologies. Ambidexterity is what the science calls the ability to simultaneously use both right and left hemispheres in our brain. In management studies, it refers to the ability to cope with and manage the contradictory powers or demands of any given situation, and is considered as an important 21st-century managerial skill.
The CEOC parts of the 3P Model train our entrepreneurial brain to capture the two seemingly-contradicting sides of our business. By utilising the 3P Canvas Routines mentioned above, and through our training of entrepreneurs that focuses on managing the contradicting demands in their ongoing business lives, we help to improve entrepreneurial ambidexterity. Rather than trying to separate and distinguish between ‘contradictions’, or ‘choosing’ one of the two, startup leaders learn how to acknowledge the contributory and developmental nature of their co-existence.
The charts below demonstrate co-existence of two (out of numerous) contradictions existing in startups business development. According to the 3P Model, these contradictions should be co-managed and co-exist. Some of our clients actively seek for CEOC couples in their businesses to assure an accurate, wining strategy, we can teach you how to do it too.
In distinguishing between PRODUCT, PEOPLE and PLAYGROUND, we are both separating and integrating these 3 pillars of our business.
Entrepreneurs must put themselves under the influence of both these opposite vectors.
I’m Keren Beit Cohen, the developer of the 3P Model and the leader of its entrepreneurial education activity and implementation. I’m a business strategy nerd who’s happy to share the 3P Model with the world, as well as the way it contributes to the startup ecosystem. So feel absolutely free to contact me with questions, ideas, or thoughts.
The 3P Model has been helping startups, investors, and entrepreneurial-education leaders since 2014. Our mission is to share the holistic 360-degree framework for startup development with as many entrepreneurs as we can, for as long as it delivers considerable value to them. We give 3P workshops around Europe, and ‘thanks’ to COVID-19, we now deliver our insights digitally across the world. We advise universities, accelerators, and schools in entrepreneurship curriculum development. Find out more about how to get involved!