JUST™ is a Symphony™ acronym for Joint Understanding of Strategic and Systemic Threads.  To comprehend the imperative nature of structured thinking and its impact on the organisation, it is imperative to recognise the deliverable first.  The concept aims to deliver a flawless series of structures, structured thoughts and procedures – a core that reflects deep understanding and purpose.

Market Myopia (Levitt, 1960) appealed to leaders to view their organisations from a perspective of the value created for customers.  Knowing how markets perceive the value created, indicates where customers position your offering in a sequence of functions they are trying to perform, defined as customer-value.  Levitt was cautioning the likes of railway companies who thought they were in the railway business.  Likewise newspaper companies sold newspapers, a full focus on activities to produce a ‘daily paper’. 

Organisations seldom recognise constituents within their customers, who have different reasons for ‘using’ the offering to achieve an outcome.  Newspapers, like pay-tv today, united subscribers and advertisers; public transportation enables commuters to connect journey stages.  The result is that industry leaders of old missed innovating extensive offerings for more constituents who remained under-served. 

Not remaining relevant to customers is a sure signal of imminent closure.  Companies who adapt and mitigate based on signals of change and deep understanding, develop an acute competence to imbed performance trajectories that not only extend their life cycle, but also introduce innovations, developments and inventions which satisfy unmet customer-needs.

Strategic threads embrace:-

• abstract thoughts and non-tangibles by uncovering unmet needs;
• comparative advantage to differentiate offerings;
• competitive advantage to provide unique and valued position;
• reveal customer-criteria and insights into what customers are trying to accomplish;
• formulate a wholesome appetite to digest insights with a discipline to exclude ‘opportunity’ that falls outside current ability and capacity;
• align competence and intelligentsia to resolve Issues, Deficiencies, Obstacles and Shortcomings;
• Uncover opportunity to serve constituents in segments of unmet customer-needs, rather than senseless demographics

Systemic threads embrace:-

• physical aspects and tangibles to deliver structures within the organisation, by defining processes and mechanisms which will render reliable results and predictable outcomes;
• design structures of networks, systems and streams to create, retain and distribute value to markets;
• debunk industry chains of layers between source and customers;
• introduce offerings which are relevant to end-users, customers and buyers

JUST™ enables structured thinking to incorporate deeper understanding, positioning, signals of change, desired outcomes and more.  The deliverable is the methodical formulation of a High-level model which will ultimately inform the Customer value-, Monetisation-, Business- and Enterprise model.

Without JUST™ guiding our deep Understanding, the organisation is already boarding the jolly-roger with other pirates...