Hi Reinvention Heroes, 

In this post I wanted to share with you a super powerful reinvention tool I created called SCRAMBLE. It will help you to reinvent your thinking in an instant. I also wanted to share with you three great business reinvention stories that have used some of the components from this tool to enable them to pivot to reinvent their thinking despite the horrible 'Coronaconomy'. 

But before I do that, please make sure you check out our resources page to look at some of the great tools we can help you to reinvent your thinking. 

So let's get started with our first reinvention business story all the way over to Latin America to a business by the name of Veoleo Press. Veoleo Press is  traditionally a children's publishing company and as you can imagine, in the current economy their business was struggling. They  started thinking, 'How could we reinvent our thinking?'  Which subsequently led to them asking to themselves, "What could we substitute in the work that we are already doing?". 

The insight that they started off with was that 'Parents have become teachers'. Which means rather than selling just books, they needed to help create a product that would help parents (now teachers) come up with something that would make their teaching more entertaining. 

"What if we could substitute books with worksheets?"  Turn something that was a bit boring for the kids into something that was fun. So they combined their publishing talents with the talents  of some great artists to help create some cool colouring worksheets.

In effect they created a simple offering very quickly, to reinvent their business. Parents now look like awesome teachers, artists are getting work and the publishing house is making money and everyone's a winner. Great, simple reinvention. 

The second story I wanted to share with you is about, a company in the Gold Coast of Australia by the name of Kids events and Co. Now there are a children events company and their bread and butter is to run great children's parties.  As you can imagine, the 'Coronaconomy' came along, and no more face to face parties. 

They started to look at ways of reinventing. "What could we adapt from a theme park experience? What would we need to adapt in order to fit into a digital environment?" 

Well, you know, those characters you see dressed as superheroes that you see wandering around theme parks, they thought "What if we could get super heroes to run virtual birthday party?" What if we could have. virtual DJ and run an exciting virtual parties where kids have got all kinds of activities to do?"

"What if we still delivered balloons to  the kids houses, then they'd have something that was both physical and digital."

A simple reinvention that's going gang busters.

One last story before I unpack these business cases with the SCRAMBLE technique.

Next, I wanted to talk to you about Wheelers Books. Now, Wheelers Books were traditionally a book supplier to libraries and school libraries. They had an inkling that this 'Coronaconomy' could be on the cards, and so they asked a very audacious question, "What could we eliminate?" "What if we eliminated physical books?"

Now that sounds crazy. But they said, "Well, if we had no physical books, what could we be distributing to these libraries?" The answer was Ebooks. Now I know what you're thinking, ebooks aren't new. You're right but ebooks in libraries was a very uncharted territory that they could navigate by using their book supply skills with a new reinvented product.

Basically they leverage their skills as being book distributors and being able to move these books to libraries. They purchase  loanable Ebooks from publishers and then supply them to libraries.  As you can imagine, they are going very well in this Corona economy. 

You might be thinking, well, how does the SCRAMBLE technique fit into all these examples?

SCRAMBLE is an acronym I created to help people with their re-inventive thinking.

You might be thinking, well, how does the SCRAMBLE technique fit into all these examples?

SCRAMBLE is an acronym I created to help people with their re-inventive thinking. 

S stands for Substitute - what are all the elements, components or steps that we are doing or have that we could substitute?

C stands for Combine - what are all the elements, components, steps or new elements that we are doing or have that we could combine?

R is for Reverse - what are all the elements, components or steps that we are doing or have that we could reverse?

A is for Adapt - what are some elements, components, steps, process or technology that we could adapt from a different industry?

M is for Multiply - what are all the elements, components or steps that we are doing or have that we could multiply?

B is for Break up or Break down - what are all the elements, components or steps that we are doing or have that we could break up or break down further?

L is for Leverage - what are all the elements, components or steps that we are doing or have that we could leverage elsewhere?

E is for Eliminate - what are all the elements, components or steps that we are doing or have that we could eliminate?

So when we look at those three businesses we can see how the SCRAMBLE technique applies. The first one, Veoleo Press, the children's book publishing business asked, "What if we were to substitute colouring work sheets for books?"  and "What if we could combine the talents of artists with worksheets?"

Kids events & co asked "What could we adapt from theme parks?" "How could we adapt super heroes to the digital environment?" 

And Wheelers Books asked "What could we eliminate, what if we could eliminate physical books, but leverage our existing book distribution model?" 

As you can see there were many examples of the SCRAMBLE technique used in their reinvention.

Conclusion

I hope the SCRAMBLE technique and those stories has given you some confidence and a tool that you can use to invent. The reason why I wanted to share these stories and tool is to help you realise that you can break this mental lock down and you can to reinvent your business. I am available for virtual reinvention sessions to help you through this tough time.

Thanks for reading. 

Cheers,
Nils

Nils Vesk