Structured thinking,
properly shelved.

A model of how one person changes: five outcomes, Awareness, Desire, Knowledge, Ability and Reinforcement, reached in sequence for a change to stick. Organisational change succeeds person by person, so diagnose each individual's weakest element and treat that barrier first.

Jeff Hiatt (Prosci)·2003

The oldest working model in marketing: move a prospect through Attention, Interest and Desire to Action. Empirically shaky as a theory of buying, yet still the most useful checklist ever written for auditing an advert, a landing page or a sales pitch.

E. St. Elmo Lewis (attributed)·1898

A two-by-two grid of growth options built from the interplay of products and markets, existing and new, that classifies every growth move as penetration, product development, market development or diversification, each carrying a different level of risk.

H. Igor Ansoff·1957

Translates vision and strategy into linked objectives and measures across four perspectives, financial, customer, internal process, and learning and growth, so an organisation steers by the drivers of future performance rather than by financial results alone.

Robert S. Kaplan and David P. Norton·1992

The core preparation discipline of principled negotiation: know the interests behind your position, build your best alternative to a deal (BATNA), derive the worst deal you would still accept, and map the zone of possible agreement (ZOPA) where both sides' limits overlap.

Roger Fisher and William Ury, Harvard Negotiation Project·1981

A portfolio grid that plots each business or product by market growth and relative market share, sorting the portfolio into stars, question marks, cash cows and dogs so that cash can be deliberately moved from where it is generated to where it will compound.

Bruce D. Henderson, Boston Consulting Group·1970

A vocabulary of nine behavioural roles that people tend to adopt in teams, grouped into thinking, action and people clusters, used as a checklist for whether a team's composition actually covers the work in front of it and where the gaps and duplications lie.

R. Meredith Belbin·1981

A strategy logic that seeks uncontested market space through value innovation, pursuing differentiation and lower cost at once. The ERRC grid is its working tool: decide which factors of competition to eliminate, raise, reduce and create, then redraw your value curve.

W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne·2005

Finds the sales volume at which contribution covers fixed costs and a venture stops losing money, then reads the gap between expected sales and that point, the margin of safety, as a measure of how much room the plan has to be wrong.

Walter Rautenstrauch (populariser), with earlier roots in Henry Hess and Charles E. Knoeppel·1930

Separates change, the external event, from transition, the internal psychological reorientation people must make before the change can work, and manages that transition through three stages: the ending, the neutral zone and the new beginning.

William Bridges·1991

The core feedback loop of the Lean Startup: turn ideas into a minimum viable product, measure how real customers respond, and learn whether to pivot or persevere, with the aim of compressing the total time between guess and evidence.

Eric Ries·2011

A one-page visual template that describes how an organisation creates, delivers and captures value across nine building blocks, from customer segments through to cost structure, so an entire business model can be seen, questioned and redesigned in a single view.

Alexander Osterwalder and Yves Pigneur·2010

A rolling projection of cash in and cash out, opening balance to closing balance, that tells you when you're going to run short of money even while the profit and loss account still looks perfectly healthy.

Standard management accounting practice, with no single named originator. The weekly, 13-week format was formalised within corporate restructuring and turnaround practice, where lenders and insolvency practitioners made it the default liquidity-reporting discipline.·2008

Maps organisational culture on two tensions, internal versus external focus and flexibility versus control, producing four competing culture types (Clan, Adhocracy, Hierarchy, Market) that can be profiled and compared, most commonly through Cameron and Quinn's OCAI survey.

Robert E. Quinn and John Rohrbaugh·1983

A test of what a corporation is genuinely good at: the collective learning and coordination skills that pass three tests by opening access to a wide variety of markets, contributing significantly to perceived customer benefit, and resisting imitation.

C. K. Prahalad and Gary Hamel·1990

An appraisal method that identifies every material cost and benefit of a proposal, expresses them in money, discounts them to present value and compares the totals, so that options are judged on evidenced net benefit rather than on the persuasiveness of their sponsors.

Jules Dupuit (theoretical foundations); developed by many hands·1844

Moore's account of why technology products stall between visionary early adopters and pragmatist mainstream buyers, and the beachhead strategy for getting across: pick one narrow segment, build the whole product it needs, and win the references pragmatists actually trust.

Geoffrey A. Moore·1991

A visualisation of the end-to-end experience of a customer with an organisation, stage by stage and touchpoint by touchpoint, capturing what the customer does, thinks and feels, in order to find the moments that matter and the points where the experience breaks.

Service design practice, building on G. Lynn Shostack's service blueprinting·1984

A sense-making framework that sorts situations into five domains by the relationship between cause and effect, so leaders can match how they decide to the kind of problem in front of them rather than to the kind they are most comfortable managing.

Dave Snowden, developed with Cynthia F. Kurtz and popularised with Mary E. Boone·1999

A weighted-criteria table for choosing between options: list the candidates, agree and weight the criteria, score each option against each criterion, and read the weighted totals. Its real product is a decision whose reasoning can be inspected and challenged.

No single originator; formalised separately by Kepner-Tregoe and Stuart Pugh·1965

A branching map of decisions, chance events and payoffs that turns a sequential choice under uncertainty into a tree you can price. Fold expected values back from the end branches to the root to find which first move is worth most.

John F. Magee (populariser); Howard Raiffa and Robert Schlaifer (underlying theory)·1964

A human-centred approach to innovation that works from empathy with users through problem definition, ideation, prototyping and testing. Popularised by IDEO and Tim Brown, and taught worldwide through the Stanford d.school's five-stage model.

IDEO and the Stanford d.school, popularised by Tim Brown; intellectual roots in Herbert A. Simon·2008

A theory of why well-run incumbents lose to entrants with simpler, cheaper offers: serving their best customers pulls incumbents upmarket past what mainstream buyers need, leaving a foothold from which an entrant improves until the mainstream defects.

Clayton M. Christensen, with Joseph L. Bower·1995

The Six Sigma improvement roadmap. Define the problem, Measure current performance, Analyse root causes, Improve the process, then Control the gains. A disciplined, data-driven cycle for fixing processes whose defects have causes that can be measured and verified.

Motorola; Six Sigma credited to Bill Smith, roadmap codified in Motorola and GE practice·1986

The Design Council's four-stage map of the design process. Two diamonds of divergent and convergent thinking: the first finds the right problem (Discover, Define), the second finds the right solution (Develop, Deliver).

The UK Design Council·2005

A prioritisation grid that sorts work by urgency and importance into four verdicts, do it now, schedule it, delegate it or eliminate it, built on the observation that the urgent and the important are rarely the same tasks.

Contested; named after Dwight D. Eisenhower, whose 1954 speech quoted the urgent-important maxim, and formalised as a four-quadrant matrix by Stephen R. Covey·1989

Plots every person touching a family firm into family, ownership and management, and the overlaps between them, so a fight about who's 'right' turns into a clear question of which boundary is actually being crossed.

Renato Tagiuri and John A. Davis·1996

Reads a set of accounts through the ratios that matter, liquidity, profitability, efficiency and gearing, to answer the two questions a business owner actually asks: can we afford this, and is the business actually healthy.

No single originator. Ratio analysis is standard management and financial accounting practice, built up through twentieth-century cost and financial accounting and codified into the form taught today by the professional accounting bodies (ICAEW, ACCA, CIMA) and standard finance textbooks. Individual ratios such as the current ratio were already in use by bankers and credit analysts before that; the DuPont system of the 1920s is an early landmark in reading several ratios together rather than one at a time.·1920

Ishikawa's cause-and-effect diagram. A team maps every plausible cause of a defined problem onto structured category branches, classically the six Ms, turning a tangle of opinions into an organised set of hypotheses that can then be verified against data.

Kaoru Ishikawa·1943

Lencioni's pyramid of five cascading team dysfunctions, from absence of trust at the base to inattention to results at the top, used to diagnose why a leadership team underperforms and to decide where the repair work has to start.

Patrick Lencioni·2002

A root-cause questioning discipline from the Toyota Production System: state the problem where it occurred, ask why of each verified answer in turn, work down from symptom through process causes to the system cause, and fix the deepest point where a countermeasure will hold.

Sakichi Toyoda (attributed); formalised by Taiichi Ohno at Toyota·1988

A systematic, bottom-up method for asking of every element of a design or process: how could this fail, what would the effect be, how likely is it, would we catch it, and which failure modes therefore deserve preventive action first.

United States armed forces (procedure MIL-P-1629); no single author·1949

A nine-cell portfolio grid that rates each business unit on industry attractiveness and competitive strength, then prescribes invest and grow, selectivity, or harvest and divest, so that corporate capital follows structural merit rather than internal politics.

McKinsey & Company, for General Electric·1971

A four-stage structure for a coaching conversation: agree the Goal, examine current Reality, generate Options, then secure the Will to act. It turns a manager's instinct to hand out answers into disciplined questions that leave ownership with the person being coached.

John Whitmore, Graham Alexander and Alan Fine·1992

A Japanese policy-deployment system that turns a handful of breakthrough objectives into aligned targets and means at every level of the organisation, negotiated through catchball, executed alongside daily management and held on course by structured review.

Japanese TQC practice of the 1960s; codified by Yoji Akao·1965

A 2x2 grid that sorts candidate actions by expected impact against effort required, separating quick wins and major projects from fill-ins and thankless tasks, so a team spends its limited capacity where it counts and gains licence to stop work that earns nothing.

No single originator; codified through quality-improvement and Lean Six Sigma practice·1990

A method for disaggregating a governing question into branches that are mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive, so a team can size the branches, prioritise the few that could swing the answer, and test them with explicit hypotheses instead of boiling the ocean.

McKinsey & Company problem-solving practice; MECE coined by Barbara Minto·1999

A lens for understanding demand: customers hire products to make progress in a specific circumstance, and whether they switch is governed by four opposing forces. Study the job and the forces around it rather than the customer's attributes or the product's features.

Clayton M. Christensen, Anthony W. Ulwick and Bob Moesta (contested)·2003

The discipline of continuous, incremental improvement involving everyone, managers and workers alike: standardise the current best way of working, surface problems against that standard, improve in small low-cost steps, then lock each gain in as the new standard and go again.

Masaaki Imai (codifying Toyota and wider Japanese practice)·1986

A model of how product attributes relate to customer satisfaction, showing that some qualities merely prevent dissatisfaction, some scale with performance and some delight unexpectedly, so that features can be classified and prioritised by the kind of satisfaction they buy.

Noriaki Kano, with Nobuhiko Seraku, Fumio Takahashi and Shinichi Tsuji·1984

An eight-step sequence for leading major change, distilled from Kotter's study of why transformations fail: build urgency and a coalition, form and communicate a vision, empower action, generate short-term wins, consolidate gains and anchor the change in culture.

John P. Kotter·1995

A one-page adaptation of the Business Model Canvas for startups, replacing four infrastructure boxes with Problem, Solution, Key metrics and Unfair advantage, so founders can document, rank and test the riskiest assumptions in a business idea instead of writing a plan.

Ash Maurya·2010

The oldest change model in the book: destabilise the current pattern of group behaviour, move to the new one, then anchor it so the group does not snap back. Lewin sketched it in 1947; later writers tidied the sketch into the staple that every change model since descends from.

Kurt Lewin (sketch); systematised posthumously by later writers·1947

The classic checklist of the controllable levers of a marketing programme, Product, Price, Place and Promotion, set around a defined target market, used to design a coherent offer and to audit an existing one for gaps and contradictions.

E. Jerome McCarthy (4P formulation); Neil H. Borden (marketing mix concept)·1960

A four-step process for identifying and prioritising an organisation's most significant impacts on the economy, environment and people, to decide what to report and act on. This is impact materiality only, not the EU's legally mandated double-materiality standard.

Global Reporting Initiative (GSSB)·2021

A diagnostic of organisational effectiveness through seven interdependent elements, strategy, structure, systems, style, staff, skills and shared values, on the premise that performance requires all seven to reinforce one another.

Robert H. Waterman Jr, Tom Peters and Julien R. Phillips, with Richard Pascale and Anthony Athos·1980

A four-category prioritisation scheme, Must have, Should have, Could have and Won't have this time, built for fixed deadlines: it guarantees a minimum usable delivery by agreeing in advance exactly what gives way when time runs short.

Dai Clegg (Oracle UK)·1994

A four-function structure, Govern, Map, Measure, Manage, for boards and leadership teams to build AI oversight into existing governance rather than bolting it on as a technical afterthought.

U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)·2023

A customer loyalty metric built on one question, how likely are you to recommend us, scored 0 to 10. Subtract the percentage of detractors (0 to 6) from the percentage of promoters (9 and 10) for a single figure that is easy to track, easy to compare, and easy to abuse.

Fred Reichheld, with Bain & Company and Satmetrix·2003

A quarterly goal-setting cycle that pairs a handful of ambitious, qualitative objectives with three to five measurable key results each, published across the organisation so teams align, track progress weekly and score honestly at the end of the cycle.

Andrew S. Grove; popularised by John Doerr·1983

A four-phase decision cycle, Observe, Orient, Decide, Act, developed by fighter pilot John Boyd. Advantage goes to the side that reads a changing situation faster and more accurately, with orientation, not raw speed, doing most of the work.

John R. Boyd·1976

A visual tree connecting a desired outcome to the customer opportunities that could drive it, the candidate solutions for each opportunity, and the assumption tests that decide which solutions survive, so discovery work stays traceable from experiment back to outcome.

Teresa Torres·2016

Juran's application of Pareto's 80/20 observation to operational problems. Categorise the defects or losses, rank them by frequency or cost, cumulate the percentages, and concentrate effort on the vital few causes that drive most of the effect, without abandoning the useful many.

Joseph M. Juran, after Vilfredo Pareto·1951

An iterative four-stage improvement cycle, plan, do, check, act, for testing a change on a small scale, studying the results against a prediction, and standardising what works before running the loop again. The engine of kaizen and of most modern quality systems.

Walter A. Shewhart and W. Edwards Deming; named PDCA by Japanese managers·1950

A structured scan of the six macro-environmental forces, political, economic, social, technological, environmental and legal, that shape the context an organisation operates in but cannot control.

Francis J. Aguilar (ETPS antecedent); later extensions by many hands·1967

Lafley and Martin's five linked questions that make strategy an integrated set of choices: what is our winning aspiration, where will we play, how will we win, what capabilities must be in place, and what management systems are required.

A. G. Lafley and Roger L. Martin·2013

A structural analysis of the five competitive forces that determine an industry's long-run profitability, and therefore where and how a business can defend or improve its position.

Michael E. Porter·1979

Porter's argument that sustainable advantage comes from one deliberate choice: compete on lower cost or on differentiation, across a broad market or a narrow one. Firms that refuse to choose end up stuck in the middle, and the middle is where margins go to die.

Michael E. Porter·1980

Before committing to a plan, imagine it is a year on and the plan has failed outright, then have each person independently write down why. Prospective hindsight legitimises the doubts a kickoff meeting suppresses, and it costs an hour.

Gary Klein·2007

A pricing discipline that anchors price to the economic value an offer creates for a defined segment, with cost setting only the floor, and that tests willingness to pay before launch using tools such as Van Westendorp's Price Sensitivity Meter and Good-Better-Best tiering.

Thomas T. Nagle (codification); Peter H. van Westendorp (Price Sensitivity Meter)·1987

Barbara Minto's method for structuring recommendations: open with the answer, hold the supporting ideas in a pyramid governed by vertical question-and-answer logic and horizontal grouping logic, and set up the whole with Situation, Complication, Question, Answer.

Barbara Minto·1987

A grid that assigns one of four roles to everyone involved in a task or decision: Responsible for doing the work, Accountable for the outcome, Consulted before it is done, Informed after. Its whole discipline lives in one rule, exactly one Accountable name per row.

No single originator; evolved from mid-century responsibility charting·1970

A role-charting tool from Bain & Company that assigns five roles for any major decision, Recommend, Agree, Perform, Input and Decide, so that one named person owns the call and everyone else knows exactly how they are expected to contribute.

Paul Rogers and Marcia Blenko, Bain & Company·2006

A forecasting method that starts from recorded outcomes of comparable past projects rather than the plan in front of you. Locating your case in that distribution, adjusting only for defensible differences, corrects the optimism and strategic misrepresentation of the inside view.

Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky (concept); Bent Flyvbjerg (operational method)·1979

A prioritisation score developed on Intercom's product team that ranks competing ideas by multiplying Reach, Impact and Confidence and dividing by Effort, so that quiet, high-value work can beat the loudest request in the room.

Sean McBride (Intercom)·2016

Places each risk on a grid of likelihood against impact so that limited attention and budget flow to the risks that are both probable and damaging, with a distinct response posture, from acceptance through to avoidance, attached to each quadrant.

United States Department of Defense system safety practice·1969

Rumelt's test of whether a strategy exists at all: a diagnosis that names the critical challenge, a guiding policy for dealing with it, and a set of coherent actions that carry the policy out. A document missing any of the three is goals, vision or fluff, whatever its cover says.

Richard P. Rumelt·2011

A discipline for building a small set of plausible, structurally different futures and rehearsing strategy inside each one. The aim is not prediction but re-perception: loosening the official future that management quietly assumes, before events do it the hard way.

Herman Kahn; Pierre Wack and colleagues at Royal Dutch Shell; Peter Schwartz·1985

Schein's model of culture as three levels: visible artifacts, espoused beliefs and values, and the basic underlying assumptions that actually drive behaviour. Diagnosis means working down the stack, because change that stops at the surface changes nothing.

Edgar H. Schein·1985

A process map of a single service that lines up the customer's actions with everything the organisation does to deliver them, above and below the line of visibility, so that failure points, waits and disconnects between frontstage and backstage can be seen and fixed.

G. Lynn Shostack·1984

Helmer's checklist of the seven conditions that create persistent differential returns. Each power pairs a benefit to the holder with a barrier that stops competitors arbitraging it away, and each becomes available only at a particular stage of a business's life.

Hamilton Helmer·2016

A back-of-envelope way to put a number on a private business using an earnings multiple and a single-stage discounted cash flow, so an owner can open a serious conversation about value with two sanity-checked figures, not a guess.

Myron J. Gordon and Eli Shapiro (origin of the dividend-discount growth formula this tool borrows for its DCF side); earnings-multiple valuation has no single originator, it is standard market practice built up by generations of dealmakers and advisers.·1956

A one-page map of a process in five columns: Suppliers, Inputs, Process, Outputs, Customers. Built at the start of an improvement effort, it fixes the scope and boundaries before anyone argues about detail, and exposes who the process actually depends on and serves.

No single originator; codified in the total quality management and Six Sigma toolkits·1990

A model of four leadership styles, from directing through coaching and supporting to delegating, matched to the follower's development level on a specific task. Effective leaders diagnose competence and commitment first, then adjust directive and supportive behaviour to fit.

Paul Hersey and Ken Blanchard·1969

De Bono's method for splitting a group's thinking into six deliberate modes, worn one at a time so the whole room examines facts, feelings, risks, benefits and new ideas together, with a blue hat running the sequence. It replaces adversarial debate with scheduled, parallel focus.

Edward de Bono·1985

A two-by-two grid that positions each stakeholder by their power over your work and their interest in it, then sets an engagement strategy per quadrant: manage closely, keep satisfied, keep informed, or simply monitor.

Aubrey L. Mendelow (grid); R. Edward Freeman (stakeholder theory)·1981

The core sequence of strategic marketing: divide a heterogeneous market into meaningful segments, choose which of them to serve, then position the offer so the chosen customers see a distinct and defensible reason to prefer it.

Wendell R. Smith (segmentation); Al Ries and Jack Trout (positioning); sequence codified and popularised by Philip Kotler·1956

A one-page causal picture of a strategy: objectives arranged across the four balanced scorecard perspectives, with hypothesised cause-and-effect arrows running upward from learning and growth through internal processes and customer outcomes to financial results.

Robert S. Kaplan and David P. Norton·2000

A four-quadrant appraisal of an organisation's internal strengths and weaknesses set against the external opportunities and threats it faces, used to surface the strategic fit between what a business can do and what its environment will reward.

Contested; commonly attributed to Albert S. Humphrey and the long-range planning team at Stanford Research Institute, with strong parallel roots in the Harvard Business School business-policy tradition of Learned, Christensen, Andrews and Guth·1965

Edmondson's validated seven-item scale and three-stage leader playbook for building a team where people can flag mistakes, risks and half-formed ideas without fear of punishment.

Amy C. Edmondson·1999

A structural model that classifies teams into four types and three interaction modes, then uses Conway's Law to redesign team boundaries deliberately around the flow of work rather than around historical accident.

Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais·2019

Goldratt's argument that every system has one binding constraint that sets its throughput. Find it, wring the most from it, subordinate everything else to it, invest to elevate it, then start again, because once a constraint is broken the constraint moves somewhere else.

Eliyahu M. Goldratt·1984

A portfolio view of growth that asks a business to manage three horizons at once: defending and extending the core, building emerging businesses, and seeding options for the future, so that today's earnings do not quietly starve tomorrow's.

Mehrdad Baghai, Stephen Coley and David White (McKinsey & Company)·1999

A governance model that separates risk work into three distinct roles: management that owns and controls risk, risk and compliance functions that oversee it, and internal audit that gives the board independent assurance that the first two are working.

No single author; codified by the Institute of Internal Auditors·2013

A matrix that turns a SWOT from an inventory into strategy by systematically pairing internal strengths and weaknesses with external opportunities and threats, generating four families of options: SO, WO, ST and WT.

Heinz Weihrich·1982

A five-stage account of how small groups develop: forming, storming, norming, performing and adjourning. Each stage pairs a relationship problem with a task problem, giving leaders a language for why a capable team is not yet delivering and what the current stage needs from them.

Bruce W. Tuckman·1965

Tests whether a business makes money on each unit sold and each customer acquired, tracing revenue through variable costs to contribution and comparing the cost of acquiring a customer with the lifetime value they return. If the unit loses money, scale multiplies the loss.

Practice-grown; codified for SaaS by David Skok among others·2010

A disaggregation of the firm into nine strategically relevant activities, five primary and four support, to locate where cost is incurred and differentiation is created, on the premise that advantage lives in activities, not in the firm as a whole.

Michael E. Porter·1985

A two-part canvas that maps a customer profile (jobs, pains, gains) against a value map (products and services, pain relievers, gain creators), so a team can state, test and improve the fit between what it offers and what one customer segment actually cares about.

Alexander Osterwalder, Yves Pigneur, Gregory Bernarda and Alan Smith·2014

A pencil-and-paper lean method for drawing every process step, inventory queue and information flow a product family passes through, so a team can see the whole flow at once, compare value-adding time with total lead time, and design a leaner future state worth implementing.

Mike Rother and John Shook (Lean Enterprise Institute)·1998

Four sequential tests, valuable, rare, inimitable, organised, that determine whether a resource or capability is a source of sustained competitive advantage or merely something the firm happens to own.

Jay B. Barney·1995

A visual method that maps the components serving a user need against how evolved each one is, from genesis to commodity, so that strategy can be debated as position and movement on a shared map rather than as competing opinions.

Simon Wardley·2005