Andrew Constable, MBA, LSSBB

Do you have a real strategy or just a plan that looks like one? 

Most organisations fail because their strategy isn’t clearly defined or it isn’t consistently executed.

Leaders tell me the same thing again and again:

“We are not confident our strategy is the right one and even when it is, it’s not being delivered. 

This dual challenge - strategy design and execution - is the core problem I help organisations with. 

𝐖𝐡𝐨 𝐈 𝐖𝐨𝐫𝐤 𝐖𝐢𝐭𝐡

CEOs, Chief Strategy Officers, transformation leaders, and senior teams who want to:

↳ Clarify strategic choices and sharpen where-to-play/how-to-win
↳ Align functions and break down siloed execution
↳ Turn Balanced Scorecards, KPIs, OKRs into performance drivers—not reporting tools
↳ Build a culture of discipline, focus, and accountability using EFQM
↳ Strengthen innovation and business model design
↳ Move from “strategic plans” to measurable, sustainable results

Whether working in Europe, North America, Asia, or the GCC, these challenges show up everywhere—and the costs are universal.

𝐇𝐨𝐰 𝐈 𝐇𝐞𝐥𝐩

I partner with leadership teams in:

1. Strategy Formulation
Clear choices, evidence-based design, and actionable strategic narratives using tools like Play-to-Win, Blue Ocean Strategy, and strategic foresight.

2. Strategy Execution Systems
Balanced Scorecards, OKRs, KPI and EFQM systems built to activate action—not bureaucracy.

3. Business Model Innovation
Helping organisations reimagine how they create, deliver, and capture value using Strategyzer, Lean Startup, and evidence-based innovation practices.

My approach blends practical execution expertise with the rigour of academic research and global experience.

𝐖𝐡𝐲 𝐋𝐞𝐚𝐝𝐞𝐫𝐬 𝐂𝐡𝐨𝐨𝐬𝐞 𝐭𝐨 𝐖𝐨𝐫𝐤 𝐖𝐢𝐭𝐡 𝐌𝐞

↳ Thinkers360 Top Voice 2023–2025 for strategy / innovation
↳ International experience with organisations including IBM, Roche, Symrise, NEC, and Informa
↳ Deep expertise across strategy formulation, execution, and business model innovation
↳ 2x Master's degrees, MBA & Master of Professional Practice  + DBA candidate researching the root causes of strategy–execution failure
↳ Certified in the world's leading strategy / Innovation frameworks

Credentials matter only because they help me solve the problem that matters most:

👉 Closing the gap between strategy design and strategy delivery.

When organisations fix that gap, they move faster, innovate smarter, and sustain higher performance.

If your strategy isn’t fully translating into results, let’s talk.

📩 andrew.constable@visualisesolutions.co.uk
🌐 www.visualisesolutions.co.uk

Principal Managing Partner

We are a consulting firm headquartered in the heart of Leicestershire, UK.

We help medium-sized businesses innovate and make measurable progress towards their business outcomes so their companies thrive.

Over the years, we’ve used proven and guaranteed Innovation and strategy execution processes to generate tangible business outcomes in 12 weeks ⏱️ for companies including Roche, IBM and many others.

Our services include

Innovation Programmes 🌟
Strategy Execution Programmes 🌟
OKR Programmes 🌟
Strategic Management 🌟

Working with a budget? Let’s talk.

Andrew Constable, MBA

Most companies don’t fail because of poor strategy.

They stall because their internal systems are misaligned.

☑ Strategy says one thing.
☑ Structure supports another.
☑ Culture, leadership, and capabilities aren’t in sync.

↳ The result? Confusion. Friction. Lost momentum.

Michael Beer makes this clear: organisational effectiveness depends on a high-fit system, where every part of your business reinforces the others.

And the fix isn’t a new framework or consultant deck.

It’s open, honest, and public conversations across all levels of the org. That’s how you expose misalignment—and start closing the gap.

Key takeaways for leaders:

1. Alignment isn’t a one-and-done. It’s ongoing.
2. Silence is riskier than candour.
3. Fitness = adaptability. Not perfection.
4. Your employees see the cracks before you do.

Organizational fitness is a moving target—but it’s one worth chasing.

Is your company built to compete?

P.S. If you like content like this, please follow me.

Andrew Constable, MBA, Prof M

Strategy fails long before execution.

It fails at posture.

Most organisations don’t have a strategy problem.
They have a strategic posture problem.

Here’s what that actually means:

☑ Strategic posture is your dominant orientation.
↳ Are you aggressive or defensive?
↳ Shaping markets or reacting to them?
↳ Optimising for efficiency or innovation?
↳ Protecting the core or exploring new growth?

It reflects:
↳ Risk appetite
↳ Growth ambition
↳ Competitive intent
↳ Innovation intensity
↳ Resource allocation bias

It’s the umbrella logic behind every " where to play " and " how to win " choice.

And most leaders never make it explicit.

The 4 classic postures (Miles & Snow model):

☑ Prospector
↳ Constant innovation
↳ First-mover behaviour
↳ High risk tolerance
↳ Heavy R&D investment

Example: Tesla in its early EV push.

☑ Defender
↳ Protects core markets
↳ Cost discipline
↳ Operational efficiency
↳ Limited innovation

Example: Ryanair.

☑ Analyzer
↳ Hybrid model
↳ Defends the core
↳ Selectively innovates
↳ Follows proven breakthroughs

Example: Apple.

☑ Reactor
↳ No consistent logic
↳ Strategy by pressure
↳ Internal misalignment

This isn’t a posture.
It’s a warning sign.

Now here’s where most companies get it wrong:

They confuse posture with strategy.

Strategic posture = broad stance.
Strategy = specific choices.

Posture shapes:
☑ Investment decisions
☑ KPI design
☑ Org structure
☑ Talent profile
☑ OKRs

If your KPIs reward Defender behaviour…
But leadership declares a Prospector ambition…

You don’t have a performance issue.

You have structural hypocrisy.

That’s how the strategy–execution gap widens.

Posture must be visible in:

☑ Capital allocation
☑ Leadership behaviour
☑ Performance systems
☑ Capability building

If it’s not embedded in systems,
it’s just rhetoric.

Another lens to think about posture:

☑ Offensive vs Defensive
☑ Growth vs Harvest
☑ Differentiation vs Cost Leadership
☑ Exploration vs Exploitation

At its core:

Strategic posture is your organisation’s attitude toward uncertainty and competition.

Make it explicit.
Align systems to it.
Or accept drift.

Strategy doesn’t fail in PowerPoint.
It fails in posture.

Ps. if you like content like this, please follow me.

Founder/CEO @ LEANSTACK | Bestselling author and founder

I have bootstrapped several products to millions of users and worked with thousands of early-stage entrepreneurs worldwide - helping them systematically find repeatable and scalable business models using my battle-tested playbooks. 

Instead of:
-Spending several months building a product you hope people will buy.

Imagine a world where you:
- Spend several weeks defining a product you know people will buy.

For aspiring or early-stage founders:

If you’re looking to bootstart your idea, consider joining my 30-day Business Model Design Challenge below: 

You'll learn how to:
- Find or test a big idea worth pursuing,
- Design a business model blueprint,
- Stress-test your idea before investing time, money, and effort. 

Join the next Business Model Design Challenge:
https://runlean.ly/challenge

Ash Maurya

The difference between startup success and failure lies in mindset, not skill set.

Skills are learnable, but knowing which skills to learn starts with the right mindset.

Here are my 10 Continuous Innovation mindsets:

MODEL
1. Your business model, not your solution, is the product.
2. Love the problem, not your solution.
3. Traction is the goal.

PRIORITIZE
4. Right action, right time.
5. Tackle your riskiest assumptions in stages.
6. Constraints are a gift.
7. Hold yourself externally accountable.

TEST
8. Place many small bets.
9. Make evidence-based decisions. 
10. Breakthrough comes from unexpected outcomes.

I build systematic frameworks for early-stage founders. Author and creator of Lean Canvas.

I created Lean Canvas 12 years ago.

Since then, millions of founders have used it to map their business model on a single page.

But I've always known the canvas was only step 1.

The real question was never "can you fill out a canvas?" — it was "is your business model going to work?"

That's the gap I've been trying to close for over a decade — with books, courses, workshops.

And now, there's LEANSpark.

The Just Start Manifesto (updated)
==========================
1. Entrepreneurs Are Everywhere.
2. There is No Better Time to Start.
3. Most Products Still Fail.
4. The Number One Reason Why Products Fail: Building Something Nobody Wants. 
5. The Number Two Reason Why Products Fail: Not starting. 
6. You Don’t Need Permission to Start.
7. Don’t Write a Business Plan. Sketch a Business Model.
8. Take Stock of Your Key Beliefs.
9. Take Stock of Your Key Metrics.
10. Take Stock of Your Key Insights.
11. Have Faith in Yourself. Be Ruthless With Your Ideas.
12. Don't Start With an MVP.
13. Not Faux Validation, But Traction
14. Love the Problem, Not Your Solution.
15. Sell Before You Build.
16. Bootstrap Your Way to Early Traction.
17. Focus on Time Versus Timing.
18. Value Your Time Correctly.
19. Avoid Premature Optimization.
20. Practice Right Action, Right Time.
21. Speed of Learning is the Only Unfair Advantage.
22. Speed of Learning x Speed of Execution = 100x Founder.
23. Remove Failure from Your Vocabulary.
24. It’s Time to Act on Your Big Idea.
25. Just Start.

The Just Start Manifesto

Most founders defer pricing until after they build their product. This is backwards.

Your pricing model should determine your product, not the other way around.

When you give away your product for free, you attract more users than customers. Users drown out the true voice of your customer, steering you down the wrong path.

Price is part of your product. It signals your positioning and determines which customers you attract.

What you charge isn't the user's job to figure out—it's yours.

Are you building for users or customers?

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Starting with a solution is like building a key without a door.

Sure, you can build a great-looking key quickly, but then you spend a lot of time searching for the right door to open.

You might get lucky or brute-force your way in, but where you end up is usually not where you expected to be.

If you flip this around and start with doors, or problems worth solving, key-building becomes much easier.

You start building keys to doors that take you places.

Love the problem, not your solution.

Your business model, not solution, is the true product. 

This was the original mindset shift that got me to view a working business model as a product. 

This opened the door to applying product development concepts to business model development. 

When tackling a complex product, 
- you start with a design or blueprint, 
- prioritize what’s riskiest over what’s easiest, 
- iteratively build the product. 

Your business model is no different. 

Model - Prioritize - Test

Most Lean Canvases I see have this problem.

Trying to be two (or more) businesses at once.

I see this pattern constantly:

- Customer segment says "Small businesses AND enterprises"
- Revenue streams lists "subscriptions AND marketplace fees"
- Problem box describes two unrelated pain points

This is split model confusion. And it's the #1 reason for aimless wandering. 

Too many business models makes your canvas vague and you can't test a vague idea. 

The solution: create multiple smaller focused variants with exactly one business model on them. 

Here's how:

1. Detect the split axis
Is the tension in your customer segments? Your revenue model? Your channels? Your solution?

2. Stress-test independently
Run each variant through the same rigor: viability, desirability, and feasibility. The numbers will tell you which model has the most potential.

3. Choose with evidence, not intuition
Now you're not guessing which model to pursue. You're comparing validated data across focused alternatives.

This is the search mindset.

Most founders skip straight to execution with a single, broad model and spend months wondering why nothing clicks.

The best founders explore 2-3 focused models in parallel and converge on the winner fast.

I built this entire workflow into LEANSpark. It detects the split, generates focused variants in parallel, and lets you stress-test each one independently.

Watch it in action 👇

Creating a business model in 2011:
1. Download a Lean Canvas template
2. Create first draft in 20 mins
3. Simplify, refine, stress test.

Creating a business model in 2026:
1. Point LEANSpark to your landing page or pitch deck
2. Creates first draft in 20 seconds
3. Simplify, refine, stress test.

Finding your ideal customer used to take months of interviews, analysis, and guesswork.

Now imagine a tool that knows jobs-to-be-done theory, can pattern-match in seconds, and fully explain its analysis sources. 

New LEANSpark skill unlock: Turn a 45-minute customer interview into a one-sheet report with:
- Emotional journey visual showing key customer moments (peaks and valleys) 
- Customer Forces analysis (why they do what they do) 
- Problem discovery (struggling moments, pet peeves, and workarounds)

Next unlock: Turn 10 customer interviews into problems (worth solving) clusters (stay tuned)...

Simple models help us understand the complex. 

Before investing in any company, Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger use a latticework of mental models to evaluate the company. 

If it passes their tests, they move all in. Otherwise, they do nothing and wait.

Evaluating early-stage ideas is no different.

I have settled on 3 universal (product-agnostic) mental models that I use to
- baseline progress,
- prioritize risks, and
- formulate a “right action, right time” next step.

Here they are: 

1. Lean Canvas: Deconstruct an idea using 12 basic building blocks.

2. Traction Roadmap: Chart key milestones using 5 customer-centric metrics.  

3. Customer Forces: Understand customer behavior using 4 causal forces. 

BELIEFS + METRICS + INSIGHTS = BUSINESS MODEL STORY

How to build your first startup moat.
Most founders don’t have an unfair advantage to start, and that’s okay.

A true unfair advantage is something that cannot be easily copied or bought. And finding one takes time.

The good news is that you don’t need one at the early stages, since all ideas sound a little crazy at first. 

So, embrace your obscurity as a gift and...

First, hunker down and focus on building a compelling Unique Value Proposition before your Unfair Advantage.

Then lean into what makes your compelling Unique Value Proposition truly unique — something different and better…

Turn that into a Counter-positioning strategy -- something incumbents can't copy without hurting their business model.

You’ll have the beginnings of your first unfair advantage.

Years ago, I read Steven Pressfield's book: The War of Art that changed how I work as a founder. 

This book was about overcoming resistance. 

“Resistance is what keeps us from sitting down and doing our best work.”

Creating a startup, like art, is full of resistance. 

In the book, he alludes to a mindset of "Turning Pro" as the antidote, which he develops further in a sequel of the same title.

“Resistance hates it when we turn pro.”

Turning Pro has had a huge impact on how I work today compared to how I worked when I first launched my startup. 

We all get started on our projects by overcoming some initial resistance. 

We are amateurs driven by inspiration. 

But inspiration alone is a roller coaster and will lose out to resistance. 

The way you stay in the long game is by turning pro.

Creativity and discipline are not at odds. You need the latter to consistently drive the former. 

The best way to become a good writer: Just Write. 

The best way to become a good entrepreneur: Just Start.

Your competitive advantage is probably fake.
Most founders point to their "unfair advantage" with confidence:

"We're first to market."
"Our technology is superior."
"We have deep industry knowledge."

Here's the uncomfortable truth: None of those actually defend anything.

The three fake advantages that kill startups:

Fake Advantage #1: First Mover
Facebook wasn't first. Friendster was. MySpace was.
Google wasn't first. Yahoo, AltaVista, Ask Jeeves came before.
Airbnb wasn't first. VRBO existed for years.

Being first only matters if you build network effects or switching costs fast enough that being second becomes meaningless.

Otherwise? You're just doing expensive market education for your well-funded competitors.

Fake Advantage #2: Better Technology
This might be the most dangerous delusion in startups.

That 18-month technical lead you're proud of? Competitors close it in 6 months. With AI? Maybe 3.

Your technical moat only matters if:
- Customers actually care about the difference
- AND competitors can't replicate it

That's a narrow window.

Fake Advantage #3: Industry Knowledge
"We know this space better than anyone."

Industry knowledge helps you understand problems. But it doesn't stop competitors from learning those same problems by talking to customers.

Worse? Being too close to an industry often makes you blind to fresh approaches that disrupt it.

So what actually works?

Real advantages have three characteristics:
1. They're hard to copy (not just hard to build)
2. They compound over time
3. They create switching costs

The difference? These get stronger as you grow. Fake advantages get weaker.

The test:

Ask yourself: "What can I do that competitors can't easily copy or buy?"

If your answer is "better product" or "we were first" or "we know the space"...

You don't have an advantage. You have a head start.

And head starts don't last.

I break down the framework for identifying real advantages (and how to build them systematically) in this video:
https://lnkd.in/gx27qFbv

Open video: Does Your Startup Have a Real Moat? on youtube.com

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