Setting your course with confidence

Third Horizon helps you plan, establish and implement your strategic agenda providing you with the insights you need to ensure you’re following the right path.

We’ve helped boards, executive teams and functional leaders set their direction and determine their long-term strategic and business plans. We see opportunities in aligned industries, for best practice and for growth and transformation.

Our strategic insights are based on our insights of the disruptive trends impacting your industry and aligned industries. We strengthen these insights with our analytical capability in benchmarking, market analysis and customer and user-experience research.

So, when you launch your five-year strategy, you can do it with confidence.

Does disruption cause the end of an industry or is it an opportunity to create new industries?

What are the trends taking place in your industry – locally and globally? What are the lessons you can learn from aligned sectors, emerging organisations and from your own customers, staff and stakeholders?

The combination of technology, globalisation and demographic change is rapidly transforming public, private and non-profit organisations.

We see left-field competitors design solutions to meet customer needs. We see rapid innovation transforming organisations and informing public policy. We see organisations embrace automation, artificial intelligence and digital strategies.

We see organisations working to keep their increasingly global, multi-generational and multi-cultural employees engaged and productive, needing to ensure they have the skill-sets needed to compete and innovate. And while trust in our traditional institutions – business, government and media – is at an all-time low, we see a renewed focus on customer experience and user experience.

With all the hype surrounding disruptive trends globally, it can be easy to lose sight of what is right in front of you. While there are invariably lessons and opportunities to be learned from overseas, it is often in understanding the nuance of how those trends will play out locally that defines the success of a strategy. Third Horizon helps our clients move from the abstract to the specific, and develop robust and tangible forecasts of disruptive trends based on real insights into local markets and consumers.

As you look to respond to disruptive trends, compete in a changing landscape and demonstrate best-practice in your industry, is your strategy on target?

Do you have the right data to help you make informed decisions? Where are the hidden inefficiencies in your business and how to you compare to your peers?

Third Horizon conducts competitive benchmark studies to give organisations or industry participants:

• a better understanding of operating efficiency and comparison to peer performance
• insights into areas for sustainable business improvement
• realistic performance targets to achieve and communicate to internal stakeholders and investors
• a comprehensive understanding of alternative structures and service delivery models

Our approach to benchmarking is strategic, holistic and pragmatic, giving our clients real insight into where they sit relative to a subset of truly comparable peers, and highlighting where the biggest actionable opportunities are likely to be, but not necessarily set hard targets.

Our benchmarking service offering is founded on four core principles:

1. Nowhere to hide – benchmarking must examine the entire business, or not at all.
2. Granular – comparisons must be made at a low enough level of detail to isolate meaningful peers, targeted cost divers and metrics, and provide actionable results.
3. Flexible – comparisons should examine all potential cost drivers, explore both unit rate and overall productivity measures, not waste time arguing about the ‘best’.
4. Transparent – benchmarks are useless unless the client has confidence that the comparisons are made on an apples and apples basis, and that their derivation is understandable – we leave the opaque econometric models and endless ‘adjustment’ factors to others.

Does your current business plan reflect the current market conditions? Are you looking to expand into new markets or introduce a new product or service into your existing market?

At Third Horizon, we take the hard work out of market analysis for you, giving you an informed view of the local market conditions relevant to your business.

We examine industry ecosystems and their associated profit pools, and overlay technology cost curves and adoption forecasts to build a comprehensive picture of where and how the value in our clients industries is likely to shift over time, and what businesses, products or services you need to invest in today in order to capitalise on those shifts.

Ultimately we understand that no two business face exactly the same strategic imperatives, and that believe that these is no single strategic planning derivation process that is suitable for every situation. We work closely with our clients to find the best set of tools and frameworks that will resonate with all stakeholders and focus thinking on the key issues at hand.

Finally, we believe that in any strategic, the proof really is in the pudding – a strategy is only as good as its implementation, and our overarching goal with each of our clients to set the foundations for successful execution and move from analysis to implementation in the fastest possible timeframe.

If you’re grappling with a ‘wicked problem’, trying to drive innovation, disrupt your company or think differently to stay ahead of the market – you want to undertake research that helps uncover ‘what’s really going on’ or capture the innovation and ‘light-bulb’ solutions that exist within your organisation.

Using our Human-centred Design approach to interviewing and analysis we can draw out and explore deep insights about the problem you need to solve or the opportunity you should explore.

We conduct field research, spending time with your people, customer or suppliers in their environment to build understanding and empathy for their situation in a way that surveys and statistics do not. We also conduct in-depth interviews, talking to your people or customers to understand the relationship between their world and the problem your project is focusing on

Finally, we translate and analyse our observations to provide you with deep insights that may surprise, challenge or inspire you – and may change the course of your strategy.