The Core Idea: See What Others Don't.

In the modern world of rapid change and hypercompetition, the most significant competitive advantage comes from perceiving opportunities or shifts that others haven't yet noticed. This isn't about knowing everything, but rather seeing things with slightly more depth or noticing developments a few months before others do.

This early perception allows organizations to seize opportunities and gain a lead. It's the underlying capability that enables finding uncontested market spaces (like the "Blue Ocean" concept), identifying core strengths (core competencies), and effectively connecting with customers (client bonding).

The Process: Dynamic Reframing

This is the fundamental capacity to continuously revise and update your understanding of the world. It involves repeatedly capturing new insights and letting go of outdated ideas or perspectives.

Inspired by the idea of paradigm shifts, Dynamic Reframing applies this concept within an organization, constantly adjusting its view of reality. This process is closely linked to creativity.

The Outcome: Expanding Your Horizon of Possibilities

The result of Dynamic Reframing is the expansion of your "horizon of possibilities". This concept, drawn from philosophy, represents the limits of what you can perceive, understand, and imagine as potential options or realities.

By gaining new experience, learning, and engaging with the world, this horizon shifts and expands, revealing new avenues and possibilities. This expanded perspective itself is presented as the source of competitive advantage.

The Primary Engine: Strategic Conversation.

Strategy is understood not as a static plan but as a dynamic process built through collective human interaction. Strategic Conversation is a discipline of collective thinking and inquiry where teams engage in dialogue to make shared sense of observations, interpretations, and generate insights.

It's the mechanism specifically highlighted as generating Dynamic Reframing. The quality of this ongoing conversation directly impacts the quality of the strategy being developed. Key elements include listening effectively (Insightful Listening) and potentially integrating AI as an interlocutor.

Additional Pathways: Scientific Inquiry and Creative Exploration.

While Strategic Conversation is central, expanding the horizon and gaining insight also happens through two other complementary pathways. One is drawing on techniques from scientific inquiry for structured investigation, pattern recognition, testing assumptions, and seeking anomalies.

The other is through creative exploration, which involves cultivating openness, challenging assumptions, rejecting the status quo, and generating new ideas through divergent and convergent thinking.

The Structure for Action: The STORI Model

This is the framework used to translate the insights gained from Dynamic Reframing into an actionable strategy. Unlike traditional planning models, STORI frames strategy as a specific "play" or sequence of moves. The acronym represents key components of this play: Start (the initial situation based on insight), Target (the desired future state), Obstacle (the critical challenge to overcome), Road (the key decisions defining the path), and Implementation (the specific actions to be taken).

The Output Format: The Napkin.

The core STORI play is designed to be summarized concisely on a single page, referred to as the "Servilleta" or Napkin. This constraint forces clarity and ensures the strategy is easy to understand and communicate. The Implementation section must be written in the first person by the person responsible, fostering accountability and commitment. The Napkin format itself serves as a simple quality control mechanism.

Built to Change

It’s not easy for a CEO to change an established strategy. It requires crafting a new narrative, maintaining trust, and dealing with budget and project management challenges.

The Insight-Napkin Framework was designed from the outset to support a continuously evolving strategy. This is accomplished by:


A) A strategy that emerges from evolving insights avoids erratic changes.
B) With strategic conversation at its core, everyone is following the discussion and prepared for any change of course.
C) Always having the latest version of the strategy written on a napkin gives you a clear record of how your strategy is evolving.
D) The STORI model is a narrative framework that communicates the new direction and the reasons behind the shift from the old strategy.

Organizational Fit of the Framework

Many organizations lack a culture of dialogue, openness, and reflection. However, this isn’t a barrier to adopting the Insight-Napkin Framework, because it isn’t an all-or-nothing model. Highly cohesive teams and dynamic organizations may embrace its full potential, but any organization can adopt the concepts from the model that best align with their culture.

Every organization has its own process for writing its strategy, which can absolutely benefit from techniques in the Insight-Napkin Framework. These techniques can significantly reduce misunderstandings during deliberations, enhance observations, and support the creation of a clearer narrative for the future.

Scaling Insight-Napkin to the corporation

Insight-Napkin is highly effective at the team or initiative level, but can it be scaled to a corporate level? The answer is yes—and it comes in two forms.

First, you can use the framework to write the one-page core strategy for each department and for the corporation as a whole. This helps ensure that strategies are clear, focused, and actionable. Then, you can apply it alongside planning tools (like OKRs or OGSM), which are already established to manage portfolio coordination and financial targets.

If the corporate culture allows, the framework can go a step further. It views strategy as a collection of interconnected substrategies—like a fractal—each owned by committed executors. The enterprise is not primarily seen in terms of departments or functions, but as a team of people engaged in a shared conversation, each responsible for their part of the plan.

This reflects Steve Jobs' organizational philosophy and echoes his words in a 2010 interview, where he described Apple as “the biggest startup on the planet.”