Dilemma of Generating Alternatives for Issue Tree Analysis

Assignments! Assignments! I’m now at the stage of “generating alternatives” section of the Business Strategic Leadership assignment…….

The idea was simple, which was to generate alternatives of a chosen strategic issue. The tips are:

1. Make sure the alternatives are completely different.
2. Make sure the alternatives are not fine-tuning a solution.
3. Exhaust all known alternatives.
4. Use lateral thinking techniques (whatever that is!)

Okay, sound easy? If it is so easy, how come I’m stuck here for days?

My chosen strategic Issue was “how to influence retail Merchants to rollout our payment terminals?”

That sounds easy (at first glance). I could do it:

Alternative 1 : Offer signup incentives to retail merchants such as subsidized terminal rental.

Alternative 2 : Offer attractive MDR to retail merchants.

Wait a minute! Offering attractive MDR was also a form of signup incentive, not so “different” from the idea in Alternative 1. In fact, I could do Alternative 1 together with Alternative 2.

Okay. So I merged the two ideas and it became:

Alternative 1 (revised): Offer signup incentives to retail merchants such as subsidized terminal rental and competitive MDR.

Then, the dilemma came in as well:

Alternative 2 (revised): ????????

I could not think of other different alternatives!

As easy as it might sound, it was definitely not easy when you actually practicing it. That’s why I was stuck for few days.