Value chain analysis
Walk the value chain with capability lenses on, follow the money leaks, and harvest the floor's own list — the three passes that surface real opportunities.
Capabilities in hand, you need somewhere to point them. Brainstorms produce what's memorable; structured passes over the value chain produce what's there. Three passes, in order of increasing surprise:
Pass 1 — Walk the chain
Lay out the value chain end to end — for Alder: sell → quote → book → dispatch → haul → deliver → invoice → collect → support, plus the support functions (HR, finance, safety, maintenance). At each link, ask the six capability verbs: what gets classified here? extracted? drafted? predicted? The walk is mechanical on purpose — mechanical finds the opportunities charisma skips. Alder's walk surfaced: quote-request extraction (sales re-types tender documents), delivery-exception triage (the 3,000 emails), predictive ETA for the top 20 accounts, invoice-dispute drafting, and driver-log auditing. None glamorous; all real.
Pass 2 — Follow the money leaks
Pull the cost and revenue lines leadership already worries about, and ask what information failure sits underneath each. Detention fees (trucks waiting at docks) trace to bad appointment data → a predict opportunity. Won-then-unprofitable contracts trace to optimistic quoting → a predict/optimize opportunity. Churn in mid-tier accounts traces to service issues nobody aggregated → classify + summarize. Money leaks are information failures wearing operational costumes — and information failures are exactly what the six capabilities attack. This pass ties every candidate to a line item, which will make Module 2's ROI work honest instead of theatrical.
Pass 3 — Harvest the floor
- Ask managers one question, verbatim: 'What does your team do repeatedly that feels beneath their skill level?' The answers are an opportunity inventory nobody upstairs could have written. (Teams that have taken AI Foundations or the Automation course will hand you scored lists.)
- Find the shadow users — the dispatcher already pasting exception emails into a chatbot, quietly. Shadow usage is demand signal, risk signal, and your best pilot-team roster, all in one. Don't punish it; drain it into the program (Module 4 gives it a policy home).
- Weight this pass properly: top-down passes find the big opportunities, the floor finds the real ones, and the portfolio needs both. Strategies built purely top-down die in the middle of the org; Module 5 is about why.
One afternoon of competitive scanning: competitors' careers pages (roles reveal roadmaps), earnings-call transcripts, industry-press case studies — an AI assistant with web access compresses this to an hour. You're not copying; you're calibrating ambition and spotting table-stakes-in-two-years items (in logistics: predictive ETA is nearly there already). Note what you find; it goes in the roadmap's context section.