3C Snapshot
Before any strategic decision there are three things you should know cold: what your organisation genuinely does well and where it's constrained, what your customers are actually trying to accomplish, and where competitors are strong and vulnerable. Miss any one and your strategy will be off no matter how good the other two are.
But the trap is writing three separate paragraphs and calling it strategy. That is a background document. The strategy lives in the intersections.
The method
If the business is a real, named company, search the web for current facts first — recent results, competitor moves, pricing, customer commentary — rather than writing the three Cs from memory. A 3C built on stale facts is confidently wrong in all three columns. Date-stamp the snapshot, because it ages fast.
Build three honest views:
- Company — real strengths and real constraints. Not the brochure version.
- Customer — what they're actually trying to get done, not what they say they want.
- Competitor — where each rival is positioned, strong, and exposed.
Then force the intersections, because that is where the insight is:
- Where do our genuine strengths meet an underserved customer need?
- Where are competitors failing customers in a way we can exploit cheaply or quickly?
The place where your strength meets an unmet need that competitors can't easily serve is your right to win. That single sentence is what turns a background scan into a strategic argument.
Output format
- Company / Customer / Competitor: a tight, honest paragraph each.
- The intersection: one or two sentences naming the right to win, or the tension, that the three Cs reveal together.
- As-at date: the date of the snapshot, so a reader knows how fresh it is.
How to run it
Default to producing the snapshot: all three Cs plus the intersection, never omitting the intersection. Switch to coaching when the user signals they want the practice: ask them to draft the three Cs and then find the intersection themselves; most people stop at the three descriptions, and pushing them to the intersection is the whole lesson.
Where this breaks
The 3Cs are a snapshot, so they miss anything moving fast: a competitor about to launch, a customer need that is shifting, a regulatory change reshaping the market. Pair it with a forward-looking scan when timing matters. The framework is also only as honest as the Company view; a flattering self-assessment quietly poisons the whole analysis, so push hardest there.
Style
Plain language, no em dashes, short paragraphs. The three Cs are a means to the intersection, not the output.