Organisational levels
Chapter 5 - Organisational futuring
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Welcome to the Organisational levels page
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Creation of layers
We create layers of experiences from what is important (interests - why) and valuable (values - how) to us at every moment of our lives.
They are the two primary dimensions.
- Interest, the active dimension, spans
- ← from autonomy
- to participation →
- Values, the second one, spans
- from connectedness ↑
- to coherence ↓
- In turn, the layers they create, constructs a third dimension we can use to create levels from
- competencies
- to our relevant goals.
How this works is best explained by the theory of constructed emotions.
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Outer focus level
Strategies for ecosystem architects
| Outer Focus | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Public ecosystem architect | ||||
| Co-alescence | Co-operation | |||
| Ecosystem emergence | Ecosystem evolution | |||
| Co-optetition | Contained contestation | |||
| Private ecosystem architect |
Co-operation
- Create conditions for cooperation, wherein ecosystem participants pursue compatible goals while exchanging resources and engaging in joint activities
- Provide mechanisms that enable the maturation of cooperative relationships among ecosystem actors, such as identifyreaffirming events, shared infrastructure and governance arrangements that encourage positivesum thinking
- Catalyze ecosystem competitiveness and productivity by broadly disseminating key learnings
- Incentivize successful entrepreneurs to remain in and give back to ecosystems through advocating for tax rebates, subsidizing work premises, and creating opportunities for mentoring and governance contributions
- Enlist key actors to help clear ecosystem bottlenecks by convening cooperative forums and incentivizing knowledge sharing
Contained contestation
- Create conditions for contained contestation, so that fruitful outcomes can be achieved from commercial, legal, or political conflicts among ecosystem participants
- Anticipate and delimit areas of potentially destructive conflict by formulating appropriate standards, guidelines, or governing principles relating to the ecosystem
- Provide mechanisms for dispute resolution through negotiation, mediation, or arbitration processes
- Seek to earn and maintain the trust of complementors by avoiding behaviors that complementors could perceive as opportunistic or predatory
- Surface the risk appetites and likely decisions of ecosystem actors to better anticipate sources of conflict
- Consider formal or informal mechanisms to limit the value appropriation power of dominant ecosystem actors
Co-opetition
- Create conditions for coopetition, wherein ecosystem participants are simultaneously encouraged to compete and cooperate with each other
- Establish ecosystem governance arrangements that effectively balance the growth of the ecosystem and the commercial relationships between ecosystem actors
- Set rules or parameters around ecosystem coopetition to manage transitions between ecosystems
- Make ecosystem design choices that support technology modularity and allow for interoperability of production and consumption within the ecosystem
- Support temporary gatherings, such as hackathons and events, that allow for social tie formation around emerging platform technologies
Co-alescence
- Create conditions for coalescence, so that ecosystem participants form embryonic relationships and initial mechanisms for interacting
- Encourage new connections among ecosystem participants by initiating and administering programs that bring together disparate actors
- Facilitate dialog and nurture trust by hosting forums that allow ecosystem participants to develop shared practices and meanings
- Empower other ecosystem actors to create opportunities for further connecting
- Role-model attitudes and behaviors that build goodwill among ecosystem actors
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Jobs-to-be-done
| Outer Focus | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Charge less | ||||
| Disruptive strategy | Dominant strategy | |||
| Get the jobs done worse | Get the jobs done better | |||
| Discrete strategy | Differentiated strategy | |||
| Charge more |
Dominant strategy
- Win ALL types of customers (over- & underserved)
Differentiated strategy
- Win ONLY underserved customers
Discrete strategy
- Win customers with limited options
Disruptive strategy
- Win overserved customers (& non-customers)
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Other focus level
Middle Management Model
| Other focus | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Open up to other levels | ||||
| Liaison officer | Strategy challenger | |||
| Convergent | Divergent | |||
| Showrunner | Space creator | |||
| Stay on the known level |
Strategy challenger
- Strengths
- Solutions for organisational issues put on the top agenda
- Initiate strategic renewal
- Activities:
- Translate adaptive challenges into feasible claims
- Bringing stakeholders into motion with political skill
- Challenge:
- Formulate a strong claim
- Political will and skill development
Space creator
- Unique contribution:
- Organisational renewal and bring innovation
- Activities:
- Giving structural freedom of movement to employees and teams.
- Entrepreneurship, experimentation, learning and development are stimulated in purposeful direction and in a psychologically safe climate.
- Challenge:
- Balancing between disciplined performance and innovation
- Put itself in development mode
Showrunner
- Unique contribution:
- Ensure operational continuity
- Implement strategic change
- Activities:
- Organizing implementation and top down change
- Inspiring, coaching, motivating and facilitating people
- Challenge:
- Extend classic role as leader of transactions to include people leadership in change, including themselves
Liaison officer
- Unique contribution:
- Synthesize the effects of the strategy used
- Feeding the top so that the strategy can be adjusted or renewed
- Activities:
- linking information, human and social capital between the different parts in it organization system
- recognizing organizational issues, such as structural holes, toxic patterns and resource magnets, and learning to name that to the top
- Challenge:
- Acting from a lived vision and commitment to the collective
- Develop strategic social capital and political agility
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HR Model
| Other Focus | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Strategic focus | ||||
| Strategic partner | Change agent | |||
| Process focus | People focus | |||
| Administrative expert | Employee champion | |||
| Operational focus |
Change agent
- Unique contribution:
- Creates capacity for change and a renewed organisation
- Activities:
- Staffing, organisational design, survey action planning, performance measurement, training and development.
Employee champion
- Unique contribution:
- Contributes to dedicated and competent employees
- Activities:
- Employee relations, labor relations, safety & workers' compensation, diversity
Administrative expert
- Unique contribution:
- Ensures that the process is in order
- Activities
- Compensation & benefits, HR information systems, compliance.
Strategic partner
- Unique contribution:
- Ensures a successful implementation of the business strategy by translating the business goals into concrete HR strategy as a strategic partner of the management
- Activities:
- Strategic HR planning, HR business partner, culture and image
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Inner focus level
The next CEO Model
| Inner focus | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Large strategic change | ||||
| Turn around | Transformation | |||
| Short term | Long term | |||
| Continuation | Evolution | |||
| Small strategic change |
Transformation
- Unique contribution:
- The ceo changes the strategy
- Challenge:
- Context has changed
Evolution
- Unique contribution:
- The ceo adapts and executes the strategy
- Challenge:
- Minor context changes
Continuation
- Unique contribution:
- The ceo executes the existing strategy
- Challenge:
- The context is stable
Turnaround
- Unique contribution:
- The ceo breaks the inertia and initiates turnaround
- Challenge:
- Financial distress
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| Inner focus | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Connectedness | ||||
| Reframe | Do | |||
| Autonomy | Participation | |||
| Prime | Sustain | |||
| Coherence |
Do
To navigate uncertainty, the next step is to take action. Our research demonstrates that most successful breakthroughs and start-ups are not made with a single giant step, but through a series of small incremental steps and changes in course along the way. We also learn from the best start-up accelerators that the best way to learn your way through uncertain environments is to talk to as many people from as many different backgrounds, as soon and quickly as possible.
One of the most empowering skills is to set yourself up so that you cannot fail. David Heinemeier Hansson, creator of the Ruby on Rails full-stack framework and cofounder of multiple start-ups like Basecamp and Hey.com, uses an approach we call “values over goals”. Instead of focusing on a goal (which under uncertainty is just a guess), he argues that focusing on achieving your intrinsic values (which for him includes coding great software and acting ethically in the market) ensures that you can succeed, no matter how the external world responds. Uncertainty is best resolved by taking action, but if you do so based on your values – such as learning, growth, discovery, and living the life you care about – you can ensure your own success.
Another tool is to activate and unlock what’s already present instead of inventing a new solution. Maria Montessori developed an eponymous early childhood education method that activates and unlocks the natural curiosity of children with intellectual and developmental disabilities instead of reinventing the wheel.
- Values - Goals
- Cognitieve flexibility
- Learning
- Bricolage
- Smaal steps
- Pivots
Sustain
Two important ingredients to sustain action in times of uncertainty are: emotional hygiene and reality check. We need to attend to our emotions – like how you would a physical wound – to prevent paralysing self-doubt or unproductive rumination. At the same time, recognise that setbacks and failure are part of the learning journey. Another ingredient we often neglect is to interact with the people, places and things that increase your chances of the leaps in insight, connection and serendipity that can change everything.
“Science is full of uncertainty,” said Ben Feringa, winner of the 2016 Nobel Prize in chemistry for his work on the molecular machines that could one day power nanobots in your blood to protect you from cancer or repair the pipes in your house from the inside. When asked how he deals with the uncertainty that attends scientific breakthroughs, he explained, “If you deal with uncertainty you will fail,” so you have to “get resilient at handling the frustration that comes with uncertainty”. This involves letting himself stew for a while over the setback and then asking, “What can I learn from it? What is the next step that I can be working on?”
This ability to find an “upside beyond the ‘failure’” is one of many frustrationmanagement frames innovators use to sustain themselves through uncertainty’s roller coaster of obstacles and breakthroughs.
- Reality check
- Emotional hygiene
Prime
Priming makes uncertainty less menacing by helping you develop selfknowledge and the conditions to pursue new projects or navigate unexpected uncertainty better. This starts with knowing your acceptance (or aversion) for a range of risks such as financial, emotional, social, physical, intellectual, political, etc. With that self-awareness, you can build your risk tolerance by taking smaller risks, even in non-related fields to increase your ability to take other risks. Another way is to simplify your life by outsourcing to focus your efforts on tackling the unknown.
Part of priming is to recognise that even the greatest innovators among us have limits to how much uncertainty they can endure. Innovators such as Steve Jobs (think black turtleneck tops) have learnt to maintain fixed habits, routines and rituals as “uncertainty balancers” that bolster stability in some parts of their lives to counterbalance parts that are in flux. Match.com founder Sam Yagan said, “My best friends are from my junior high and high school. I married my high school sweetheart, … given how much ambiguity I [deal with] at work, I do look for less in other areas of my life.”
- Know the risks
- Reals options
- Uncertainty balancers
- Reimagine resources
Reframe
The first and most crucial step is to reframe uncertainty. Studies have shown that how you describe uncertainty affects how you think, decide and act. Since humans are inherently gain-seeking and loss-averse, if treatment 1 for a new disease is described as 95 percent effective versus treatment 2 that is 5 percent ineffective, we are more likely to choose treatment 1 even though both are statistically identical.
One reframing tool is the infinite game approach originally developed by New York University professor and philosopher, James Carse. Are you living your life with an “finite” lens where you learn and play by the rules to win, or living a more “infinite” game where you can question and bend your role, the rules, the boundaries and even purpose of the game? Also, consider reframing frontiers – be it geographical, technological, or personal ones related to intellectual, social, emotional or financial aspects of your life.
- Frontiers
- Adjectant possible
- Stories
| Content source |
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| Can We Get Better at Navigating Uncertainty? - Nathan Furr - INSEAD - 2022 |
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Competing Values
| Inner focus | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Flexibility | ||||
| Human Relations Model | Open Systems Model | |||
| Internal orientation | External orientation | |||
| Internal Process Model | Rational Goal Model | |||
| Control |
Open Systems Model
Innovator
- Living with change
- Thinking creatively
- Managing change
Broker
- Building and maintaining a power base
- Negotiating agreement and commitment
- Presenting ideas
Rational Goal Model
Producer
- Working productively
- Fostering a productive work environment
- Managing time and stress
Director
- Developing and communicating a vision
- Setting goals and objectives
- Designing and organising
- Managing competition
Internal Process Model
Monitor
- Monitoring individual performance
- Managing collective performance & process
- Analysing ibnformation with critical thinking
- Managing acculturation
Coördinator
- Managing porjects
- Designing work
- Managing across functions
Human Relations Model
Mentor
- Understanding self and others
- Communicating efficietly
- Developing employees
Facilitator
- Building teams
- Using participative decision making
- Managing conflict
| Content source |
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| Quinn & Rohrbaught - 1983 |
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Types of thinking about the future
| Inner focus | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Posibilities | ||||
| Road maps | Pathways | |||
| Certainty | Uncertainty | |||
| Forecast planning | Scenario planning | |||
| Focus |
Pathways
- Transformations
- Unknown territory
- Path unfolds as you take it
- We shap the future
Scenario Planning
- Stories of the future
- What might happen
Forecast planning
- Economic forecast
- Future similar to past
- Quntitative models
Road maps
- All agree on what to do
- Removal of uncertainty
- Moving along the road together
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