How to Run a Blue Ocean Strategy Session on a Whiteboard
Most competitive strategy assumes you're fighting over the same ground as everyone else, matching features, cutting prices, outspending rivals on the factors customers already expect. Blue Ocean strategy challenges that assumption. Instead of asking how to beat competitors, it asks which factors to eliminate, reduce, raise, or create, producing a value curve that looks meaningfully different from the competition. The insight only becomes actionable when both curves are visible at once, because the gap between them is where the strategy lives.
Watch the competitor's value curve plot across five factors in red, then watch a blue curve take a deliberately different path. Watch the gap open up between them.
Switch-Its makes both curves physical and adjustable
With Switch-Its magnetic dry-erase blocks, each data point on both value curves is a block placed at a specific level on the graph. Repositioning your strategy means physically moving a block, and the difference between the two curves is visible to everyone in the room at once.
Set the axes before plotting anything
The graph goes up first, four investment levels on the vertical axis, five competitive factors along the bottom. Red blocks represent the competitor's strategy, blue blocks represent yours. Both sets wait above the board before a single point is placed.
Plot the competitor's curve first
The red curve goes in first: high investment in Tech Specs and Admin Work, dropping sharply to low across Niche Focus, Strategy, and Risk Share. The competitor's priorities are now visible on the wall. The empty space on the right side of the graph is where the blue ocean starts to appear.
Plot your curve to find the gap
The blue curve goes where the red one doesn't, low on Tech Specs, eliminated on Admin Work, high on Niche Focus and Strategy. Where the two curves diverge is the blue ocean: the uncontested space where your strategy operates and the competitor's doesn't reach.
Blue Ocean strategy is most powerful as a group exercise. The conversation that happens while placing each block is where the real strategic thinking occurs. Making it physical means those conversations happen in front of a shared visual rather than in the abstract, which changes what gets said and what gets decided. It connects directly to the broader case for visible thinking in Put the Plan on the Wall.