12 Principles of Ecosystems Thinking
Ecosystems Thinking adapts the design principles of Permaculture to the development of agile organizations:
- Directly responsible individuals: business, design and tech stakeholders make decisions together as peers to build solutions that fit each others' constraints.
- Capture and store learning in small, self-organizing teams: as these work on the current bottleneck they become capable of opening future ones.
- Work on outcomes: teams continuously quantify their contributions to business throughput, prioritize the current bottleneck, and minimize Work In Progress.
- Align small groups of teams into self-managing business streams that continuously adapt their work priorities to changing market feedback.
- Reward mutual benefit across business streams to reduce silos, dependencies, duplication and lost opportunities, and to share resources, services and learning.
- Mercilessly refactor business streams: reuse, recycle or reduce all resources a stream produces so all contribute to business throughput and none to waste.
- Design breadth-first. Step back to see patterns in and between markets and business streams. These inform designs we can detail only as we learn more.
- Don't delegate; collaborate: people and teams are in the right relationships when their conversations evolve to support each-others' work and learning.
- Take time to simplify and automate solutions: simple, automated systems cost less than big manual ones, with less work to maintain business outcomes.
- Use and value experimentation: experiment to reduce risk and adapt each product to the changing constraints of your business streams and markets.
- Enrich interfaces and serve under-served customers: spaces between market segments are where most opportunity for innovation and productivity occurs.
- Transform to embrace change: continuously adapt organization patterns to changing market conditions and to develop its opportunities for new markets.
I'm eternally grateful to David Holmgren for his pioneering work on the Permaculture principles and his direct feedback on this extension of them, and to XSCALE Business Agility Coaches Francis Liu and Shingi Kanhukamwe for their assistance in distilling this page.
We've been exploring these ideas further on the XSCALE Podcast but feedback from any and all agilists and permaculturists here will be very helpful. For more on permaculture you should start with https://permacultureprinciples.com/ , and to get involved in XSCALE https://xscalealliance.org .
I would agree that the principles are good for an agile organization. However, the list has very little to do with a true ecosystem.
For-Purpose focussed Technology Leader
6 年Excellent! And I certainly agree with Mel Kendell's comments.? Great to hear of your engagement with David - there is certainly a lot that enterprise architecture, platform business models, etc could learn from approaches in other ecosystem fields.
Effectiveness Subversive and Skeptoptimist
6 年Actually I think you'll find that David would be pleased, he always envisaged permaculture as something with wider application - hence his book Permaculture: Principles and Pathways Beyond Sustainability.