15 "Weapons" for Strategists: How to Identify the Fatal Blind Spots of Competitors?
God Translation Bureau is a compilation team under 36Kr, focusing on fields such as technology, business, the workplace, and life, and mainly introducing new foreign technologies, new ideas, and new trends.
Editor's note: To identify your opponents' blind spots and reshape market rules, you can't rely solely on "inspiration." These 15 mental models are your "arsenal." This article is from a compilation.
My team and I are engaged in cultural strategy. This means we help brands drive culture forward and make them natural winners in the market. As a cultural brand, the only effective way to win is to change the rules and conditions of your category to your advantage while squeezing out your competitors.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) further highlights this truth. It's a force multiplier that can either magnify the flaws of weak mental models or enhance the power of strong ones. It all depends on the mental model you use to view the game.
Cultural brands usually don't win by being "better" but by changing the "rules of the game" that all players follow. You should always strive to change the entire arena.
Three Stages
We divide our strategy into three stages. Here are some core mental models we use to change the game landscape for our clients at each stage:
Stage 1: Exploration
1. Tight & Loose Culture
2. The Shape of the Market
3. Innovation Happens at the Intersections
4. Rumsfeld Matrix
5. 'T' Shaped Information Diet
Stage 2: Decision
6. Divergent & Convergent Thinking
7. The Ingredients of Play
8. Tension Earns Attention
9. Inversion
10. Local vs. Global Maxima
Stage 3: Action
11. Friction vs. Fuel
12. Memetic Desire
13. 7 Dimensions of Persuasion
14. Pre-Mortem
15. Fall To Your Systems
You'll find that these aren't typical mental models because they don't focus on building trendy companies but on working hard to change the market environment around the company. That's what makes a true cultural brand.
Most organizations stagnate because they explore too narrowly, make decisions too slowly, and execute without discipline. These tools are designed to bridge these gaps.
Let's start with the "exploration" tools...
1. Tight & Loose Culture
Sociologist Michele Gelfand tells us that cultures are distributed along a spectrum, with "tight" on one end (clear rules, strict enforcement, low tolerance for deviant behavior) and "loose" on the other (flexible norms, lax enforcement, high tolerance for non-conventional behavior). This applies to countries, markets, industries, and communities alike.
When a culture leans too far in one direction, people yearn for the other. In "tight" fields like finance or healthcare, innovation often comes from injecting "looseness": providing more choices, alternative paths, and room for new norms. In "loose" fields like AI or parenting, value comes from adding "clarity": reducing overwhelm, narrowing choices, and providing guidance.
Use this perspective to identify the cultural pressure in your market: Is it too tight or too loose? The answer will tell you what kind of value people will focus on and which innovations are most likely to gain traction.
2. The Shape of the Market
Market and cultural innovation are predictable and follow a cycle with three stages: Tension, Exploration, and Disruption. Each stage has its own rules for success. When researching an industry, first determine which stage it's in. This will reveal the path to victory.
Even if your strategy is correct, using it in the wrong stage will lead to failure. This tool will help you identify the driving constraints and market forces acting on your field, so you can find the most important levers.
3. Innovation Happens at the Intersections
Every legendary innovation story is a story of "outside-in" change, where a disruptive person or company applies insights from one context to another. Nevertheless, most companies only focus on their immediate competitors.
True signals of change come from adjacent fields that are raising the standards of your audience. To foresee the future of your market, find out who is changing the behavior, expectations, and technology of popular culture.
4. Rumsfeld Matrix
If you use the same signals as others, you won't find a competitive advantage. AI exacerbates this problem by flooding the market with homogeneous insights. The Rumsfeld Matrix is a simple yet powerful tool to discover overlooked information and find truly novel insights.
All these quadrants are important, but the "Unknown Knowns" in the bottom-left corner are usually the most valuable for strategy. That's where cultural change is brewing but hasn't had a chance to express itself.
5. 'T' Shaped Information Diet
The "information diet" is the most overlooked lever. They are intangible inputs that quietly determine who can break new ground and who will blend in. Most teams never consider this and default to using the same information sources as others, ultimately getting the same results.
The strongest teams build a 'T' shaped information diet, consciously broadening the breadth of topics while each member delves deeply into different fields. To gain differentiated insights, your knowledge graph must reach areas your competitors haven't explored and surpass them in both breadth and depth. This requires authorization and intention, where each person is responsible for a unique vertical specialty, and the collective builds the horizontal breadth.
An effective "diet" has two stages: collection and processing. Collection is about casting a wide net for freshness, breadth, and depth, looking for signals others miss. Processing is about digesting these signals through discussion, debate, and synthesis, transforming raw information into sharp, novel insights. Most teams only do the first step and skip the second. The best teams build a culture around these two stages because the strength of your strategy depends on the quality, diversity, and digestion of your information diet.
Next, let's move on to Stage 2: Decision...
6. Divergent & Convergent Thinking
The strategic process echoes the creative process, which has two distinct stages: divergent thinking and convergent thinking. Each stage requires a different mindset and approach. Many teams mix them up and stifle their creativity.
The hardest part is knowing when to switch from divergence to convergence. My personal rule of thumb is: When new information no longer confuses, discomfort, or excites you, it may be time to start making connections in the convergence stage. At this point, the returns on divergent thinking are starting to diminish, and you should start shifting to convergent thinking.
7. The Ingredients of Play
"Play" is one of the strongest drivers of culture and innovation. New ideas are born here, and teams build trust for full exploration. But in most business environments, "play" is rare. Play can't be forced, scheduled, or scaled on demand. It only emerges under the right conditions.
The framework above shows these conditions: freedom (voluntary participation), safety (sharing ideas without fear of judgment), and isolation (an independent space away from the norm). When these conditions overlap, a special set of rules emerges, and the unique norms of this "play space" unleash creativity and collaboration.
If you want your team to think bigger and act faster, design an environment that meets these three conditions. Protect them, and "play" will become the incubator for your next cultural shift or breakthrough idea.
8. Tension Earns Attention
The currency of strategy is attention, and you can decide whether to win or lose it in seconds. "Tension" is the means to earn attention. If you can't create tension, you won't get engagement; without engagement, you don't have a brand. But tension evolves. Like the market, it changes. To maintain your position, you need to know which tensions are emerging, which are saturated, and seize the next shift early.
9. Inversion
Often, teams are doomed to fail before they start because they focus on solving the wrong problem. The most innovative solutions always come from redefining the problem itself.
At the Dallas-Fort Worth Airport, passengers complained about long wait times for baggage retrieval. The default framework was: How can we speed up baggage delivery? This led to costly and ineffective fixes. When the problem was reframed inversely as: How can we make the wait feel shorter? The answer was much simpler: Move the baggage claim area farther from the gates so that passengers walk more and wait less. Without adding new equipment, the complaints disappeared.
In Japan, passengers on the Shinkansen were dissatisfied with the delays between train departures due to cleaning. The initial thinking framework was: How can we speed up the cleaning? Reframing it inversely as: How can we make the wait seem reasonable? Led to different solutions. They dressed the cleaners in unique, eye-catching uniforms so that passengers could see the work being done. Understanding the purpose of the wait reduced passengers' frustration and made them more proactive in keeping the trains clean in the future.
The breakthroughs in both cases didn't come from digging deeper into the original problem but from completely reframing it. Inversion forces you to break free from default thinking and view the problem from a different perspective.
If you want original solutions, slow down before accelerating. Before rushing to find an answer, take the time to define and reframe the problem. Ask yourself: What if it were the opposite? What's the real goal? What if our constraints were completely different?
Skipping this step will trap you in a narrow perspective and predictable solutions. Treat "defining the problem" as a separate, deliberate stage, and you'll unlock possibilities that the default framework will never reveal.
10. Local vs. Global Maxima
Many companies get stuck in the "local optimum" trap. They perform "well enough" but far from their true potential because reaching the next peak means crossing a valley of lower performance. This valley is the switching cost. Without enough determination, many businesses will stagnate at the bottom, struggle in indecision, exhaust their resources, and end up with nowhere to go.
In hindsight, this seems obvious, but in practice, lack of execution kills many strategies. The key is to plan for the valley, be determined to climb, and build systems to ensure the change is carried out until the rewards are reaped.
Next, let's move on to the final stage: Action...
11. Friction vs. Fuel
When we want to drive a behavior, our instinct is to increase the "fuel" - more motivation, more incentives, more marketing. But fuel is only effective when the path is clear. More often, the fastest gains come from eliminating the "friction" that first blocks the action. Leaders and strategists prefer to use fuel, but eliminating friction is usually a more leveraged move.
When designing behavior change, plan for both the "fuel" to drive the action and the "friction" that blocks it. Only by understanding and deliberately shaping both can you create conditions for new behaviors to take root.