Overflight

An Executive Briefing Strategy to Acquire Business Intelligence, Promote Indirect Marketing & Accelerate Consensus-building

A Summary by Philip M. Burgess & Robert Panero, February, 2001

Purpose & Applications
The Overflight is the name we use to designate the application of immersion methodologies for helping decision-makers in business and government to understand places (e.g., a nation, region or locale), markets or issues about which they have little prior knowledge.

The primary purpose of the Overflight is to give busy executives a high-speed, post-graduate crash-course in a specific country or region of the world and/or a specific market or issue area in a way that can increase their understanding and advance their business development or public policy purposes.

Viewed this way, the Overflight emphasizes the "intelligence function" in decision-making and represents yet another way to apply immersion methodology now being used in many different disciplines -- from team-building and organization development to language study and the training of special forces.

There are many applications of the Overflight methodology. It has been used to:

• advance consensus-building by helping a diverse group of individuals have a shared experience learning about a complex issue in a short period of time in a face-to-face context guided by experts and specialists;
• supplement indirect marking strategies for new business development;
• facilitate information-exchange and the education of elites about complex issues or new situations.

The basic idea: If you take observant executives and expose them to new people, new places and new information under the leadership of skilled and knowledgeable Guides, Overflight participants can learn enough over a short period of time (measured in hours, days and weeks, depending on the situation) to make provisional assessments and initial decisions about priorities -- and, perhaps most important, they can acquire the foundation needed for continued self-education.

For More Information
For more details on the overflight methodology or ways it has been used over the years, both in the US and internationally, contact The Annapolis Institute to request a copy of The Overflight: An Executive Briefing Strategy to Acquire Business Intelligence, Promote Indirect Marketing & Accelerate Consensus-building. Annapolis: The Annapolis Institute, 2011.