Adaptive Customer Centric Innovation

The Adaptive Customer Centric Innovation Imperative

The Challenge

In most competitive realms, forces are escalating to accelerate requirements for change. The continued exponential growth of a large technology base combined with diminishing barriers to entry and a global economy creates a lot of white-space/green-field for launching novel angles of value creation. Which, in turn, quickens the demand for new performance requirements, the elasticity of loyalty, and deepens the mystery of what constitutes the next competitive threat. The net effect is that the useful life of products and business models are shrinking, and traditional practices are losing maneuvering room. As a result, there is a growing interest in alternatives to organizational approaches having roots in the notion of punctuated equilibrium. This is largely because those models tend to nurture an addiction to the current value proposition (exploitation myopia) thereby eroding the probability of sustained growth and durable competitive relevance.

Diminishing Lifecycles

The lifecycle of an improvement (feature, product, journey, business model…) is often represented using an s-curve/sigmoid function where Y measures value/utility and X is time. Its amplitude represents aggregate value and its slope is the speed with which the value is realized. The amount of value that accrues to the inventor is regulated by competition and therefore depends on the invention’s defensibility. Using a business model example, strategic management can be generalized as managing four stages of growth. 

The first stage, and most difficult, is originating or acquiring a compelling and viable growth opportunity. This is also where the path to transformation originates. In an effort to leverage advantage, the second stage shifts more of the organizational focus towards efficiency. This builds out organizational resources to accelerate adoption and positional advantage.

The third phase, most lucrative, places a premium on efficiency in an effort to maximize returns. Because life-cycles used to last longer, there is a wealth of information about this stage. However, competition usually requires continued sustaining/incremental innovations. Unfortunately, for a variety of reasons, these efforts usually lead to diminishing returns. For example, features aggregate in a way that increases complexity (reduces responsiveness) and eventually overshoot majority needs. This is also where organizations are most susceptible to low-end disruption by a competitor armed with a fresh perspective on the solution-space.

Ideally, as a result of preparation, the last stage is where the organization begins shifting its focus and resources to its new incubated growth S-curve as it reaches its second stage (transition). Which subsequently scales past the first S-curve. Like transferring to a new awaiting fresh horse just before the current one is exhausted. Unfortunately, the more common scenario finds a pedestrian desperately searching for a new ride.

Scaling Value Creation

The levers that help determine the potential of value creation initiatives are impact and scale. Impact represents the degree of novelty applied to the problem and/or solution space. Scale represents the scope of invasiveness into the organization’s strategic imperatives. Initiatives are typically packaged as cohesive scopes of work (program, project, epic, sprints…). The aspirations for initiatives, as determined by impact and scale, range on a continuum between sustaining to transforming.

Sustaining innovations. Improvement that preserves or incrementally extend value. For example, a new or refined feature improves the value of a product. These are the little “i” innovations. Sustaining innovations rely on deductive and inductive reasoning. As a result, they tend to be obvious next steps and their novelty is typically short lived (low amplitude S-curves and short defensibility). Sustaining innovations are used to maximize the existing value proposition.

Transforming innovations. A significant new relative increase in value potential. Typically, a fresh perspective on the problem space that leads to novel performance dimensions. They tend to derive from a combination of deeper customer insight and abductive reasoning (or by accident). Examples include new products, business models, markets, and/or disintermediation. These are the capital “I” innovations. They produce larger S-curves with a more sustainable first mover advantage. Transforming innovations transcend the existing value proposition.

Scalability is an inherent feature of transformative innovations. This can come in the form of exponential growth through mass adoption or/and providing a reservoir for a large quantity of connected complementary opportunities. The first is an invention having a long runway for growth (amplitude) while the second is an eco-system of compounding inventions (scales horizontally). The second offers the opportunity to elevate ambitions by recruiting a wider stakeholder community (resources) to intensify synergy and accelerate growth through risk sharing. 

The Innovation Portfolio

For many organizations, their competitive arena operates on the dynamics of a power curve. This significantly raises the urgency for elevating initiative impact and scale towards the transformative side of the continuum. Research tends to find that a significant majority of initiative portfolios heavily/exclusively tilt to the shallow end of sustaining. A healthy portfolio will have many incremental initiatives as a result of a strong continuous improvement practice. However, larger organizations have to guard against the innate forces that programmatically trade transformative opportunities for sustaining efforts.

An innovation portfolio is a resource allocation and management process that distributes investments across multiple horizons. The intent is to develop competencies for concurrently nurturing a wider spectrum of value creation endeavors. In most cases this will mean investing in higher ambition initiatives over a longer term. If you’re a fan of McKinsey’s three horizons, insert that here. However, for some organizations, just advancing a second horizon is a significant (possibly more realistic) accomplishment.

Alternatively, it may be easier to envision a value creation pipeline having a multi-year horizon where the objective is to optimize value throughput using a pull model. Among other things, this may help decouple the implied relationship that the size of an initiative’s value is always positively correlated with time and risk (to accommodate urgency for general purpose breakthrough technologies like AI, IoT, and Industry 4.0). The pipeline metaphor is also useful for regulating capacity to avoid the doom spiral of contention, calibrating value predictions to mitigate the biases that inflate optimism, highlight the need for aggressive resource re-allocation, and rhythmically regulating the pace of change which is a powerful organizational coordinating mechanism (like sprints in scrum or drums to oarsmen). 

Elevating Value Creation

One way of thinking about organization is to consider how well it can enable resources to maximize opportunities. This is often cast as a structural optimization challenge between the speed of adapting to emerging opportunities (adaptability) and the efficient/predictable use of resources (reliability). The speed of customers/competition is placing more relative weight on adaptability and sustained validity is insisting that the two find a way to better co-exist. Traditional organizational principles imply that the dexterity of entrepreneurial organizations solidify as they scale through optimization to maximize efficiency. However, an adaptive model doesn’t see that as a one-way journey or two independent states. Rather, it leverages a systematic program of innovative value creation to continuously transform itself. 

Adaptive Customer Centric Innovation Framework

The notion of an adaptive customer centric innovation framework (ACCIF) is a wholistic approach that harmonizes architecture, process, and culture to create sustainable innovation impact. It combines two complementary concepts. Customer centricity, a paradigm that orients organizational resources towards its customers and then shortens the distance by propagating focus on relentless value creation through enlightened relationships. Creatively recruiting customer capital to the organization’s shared purpose dominates strategy formulation, resource allocation, and decisions. The idea is that a superior understanding of its customers provides an advantage in devising vectors for actionable value creation (both problem and solution driven)

Adaptability offers the mental model flexibility and dexterity to accelerate the cycle of detecting, innovating, and executing on revelations. Because of its improvisational strength in execution it lowers risk which increases confidence for more ambitious outcomes (erodes friction). This also enables the ability to operate on multiple horizons and coalesce toward emergent structures.

Combined, customer centricity and adaptability, is a vigilant ongoing focus on mutating the value proposition in a way that continually advances relevance. It’s a powerful model for thriving in competitive realms that are increasingly characterized by burgeoning complexity / uncertainty resulting from fast-moving externalities and performance expectations. ACCIF’s employ the best of existing and emerging practices along three dimensions:

·      Agility with Alignment. Articulates strategy, orients organizational effort, and scores progress using an eco-system/taxonomy of customer engagement metaphors, nomenclatures, and metrics. The intent is to provide a distributed alignment context that is readily relatable, creatively extensible, cooperatively executable, and horizontally scalable.

·      Ideas with Action. Places a premium on continuous value creation. It makes the value creation pipeline highly visible (dynamic work design) to enhance awareness, attract swarming, and facilitate constant refinement. It leverages applied creativity with value-significance for ideas and fast-fail learning practices for their development.

·      Energy with Responsibility. Cultivates cultural elements and organizational practices that more fully liberate/engage human capacity/potential, elevate its energy to higher value pursuits, and force multiplies its speed of contribution. It offers a safe/trusting environment to encourage risk taking and information sharing.

The experience and proficiencies gained through the process of assimilating these capabilities creates a unique/durable competitive differentiator in the form of organizational knowledge. Organizational knowledge, in this context, is the collective tacit understanding and know-how that an organization wields for strategic impact. As a result, it’s a living/fast-evolving intangible asset that is duplication defiant, strategically liberating, and garners speculative enthusiasm. 

Agility with Alignment

Agility needs a structure that can fluidly adapt (rapidly position, scale, and reconfigure) to deliver a sustained innovation advantage with its principal customers. The example architecture used here employs a broad frontier of autonomous agile teams aligned in parallel through a framework of partitioned customer journeys to direct efforts and measure progress. To preserve efficiency and reduce adoption risk the architecture harmonizes adaptability with reliability in a way that exploits their relative merits while minimizing coordination contention. It uses speed as a tiering mechanism to create layers that are buffered by services thereby creating resiliency through modularization. The structure clearly emphasizes customer experience (tier 1) as the priority. Finally, the architecture maintains an expansive investment perspective and regulation mechanism while also allowing significant creative freedom around how the investments are used. For example, it can use a venture capital approach.

The combination of insight penetration power from small focused teams, their ability to scale horizontally, and their rapid responsiveness to signal changes reduces the lag time for both detecting and exploiting important behavior changes. Technology is facilitating a flourishing eco-system of services and capabilities that can be hired with increasing ease. This opportunistic tailwind expands the realm of possibilities that small teams can incorporate into their innovation processes for elevating the impact of outcomes.

It’s important to note that although the example architecture described in this section offers a footprint, it requires a culture capable of providing the mindset for making it work.

Scaling

Experience teams scale horizontally by partitioning journeys on persona. This scheme acknowledges the importance of depth and empathy for designing higher yield outcomes, continuity of experiences, team purpose through customer ownership, the superior effectiveness of small teams, and a scaling mechanism having clear fields of engagement. The architecture also scales vertically using a team of team’s approach. 

Support Layers

Supporting layers work to strengthen the responsiveness of the experience teams/layer by continuously pushing the upper limit of their innovation continuum. Notice that lower layer changes can propagate powerful generic capabilities upwards to be simultaneously exploited in a wide variety of unique ways. The experience team can inject personalization into relevant core process while process teams are free to leverage customer data to make processes more intelligent. For example, using customer value to trigger preferential treatment (utilizing the Pareto principle to protect and economically astonish high value constituents). As mentioned earlier, scaling is also an information flow challenged. This is covered in the Energy with Purpose section.

Customer Portfolio

The customer portfolio explains the eco-system health, trends, and sentiments of the organization’s customer segments. It provides key insights into strategy formulation and is used to express strategic intent which propagate to journeys (experience teams) and dashboards (process and functional teams). Journeys and dashboards provide the necessary context for systematically coordinating and optimizing improvement efforts. Conceptually, the customer portfolio is partly a reimagining of financial statements where the design goal is to re-cast generic metrics into the more intuitively informing, assessable, and actionable context of the organization’s customers. Ideally, shortening the distance between cause and effect to make the levers for achieving strategic aspirations more perceptive and ubiquitously engaging.

Energy with Purpose

Cultures determine the scale of ambitions that organizations are willing and able to entertain. Those that nurture commitment through trust tend to engage human capital more effectively to produce higher performance outcomes. A number of estimates put typical employee engagement at around 30% which hasn’t materially improved over the past 10 years. Further, 20% exhibit behaviors detrimental to the organization’s purpose and the remaining 50% are performing at the allowable minimum. That’s a sizable knowledge/capacity improvement opportunity.

In recent years, the behavioral sciences have produced a landslide of actionable insights that can be applied to organization, leadership, and incentives. It turns out that the structures and practices most likely to improve an organization’s ability to adaptively compete, are enabled and mutually reinforced by the conditions that increase employee commitment.

The design goals are to create the conditions that generate stakeholder engagement energy, channel it into high potential pursuits by eliminating/automating distractions/low-cognitive activities, and force multiply its impact through connectedness and technology. 

Cultural Elements

An adaptive organization has the requirement of moving fast through change that occurs independently on many different fronts. It’s always, at some scale, perpetually evolving which increases decision making grey areas. As a result, the culture needs to provide the umbrella for uniting actions (of-the-same-mindset) and an enduring cause for stimulating energy that overrides self-interest. Combined, these elements enable autonomous inspired action having a common trajectory with an economy of expression.

A large part of promoting customer centric innovation is to foundationally express it in the organization’s narrative. This is where the combination of shared purpose and values declare an organizational intention with personality which both clarifies stakeholder expectations and compels them to contribute/subscribe. It’s the fundamental genetic instructions that give shape to the dynamics of organizational resources. Ideally, for the purposes of ACCI, it will favor creative agility. 

Leadership

Trust is a requirement for effective learning and cooperation. It’s essential for results in the pursuit of knowledge through creative experimentation. It provides the confidence to express diverse perspectives, trigger passionate debate, and rapidly surface bad news. All of which contribute to increasing value throughput. However, trust cultures also demand high degrees of individual competence, rigor around learning, and directness (Gary P. Pisano). Some relevant leadership practices include principles from servant-leadership, leading with questions, blue ocean leadership, and similar genres. For the purposes of scaling fast with agility, management devotes significant energy towards articulating and refining decision principles that enable increases in autonomy (see Shift Thinking). 

Social Efficiencies

An adaptive organization needs sustained individual focus for effective knowledge creation. It’s important to visibly demonstrate an aggressive practice of distraction-subtraction by removing low-value activities, untangling complexity, and re-envisioning job structures. This is an ongoing process that builds and addresses a backlog of cognitive debt. The intent is to continuously elevate the collective cognitive capacity to increasingly higher value pursuits. In the pursuit of meaningful accomplishment, it’s a no-one left behind mentality. 

Obviously, a good way to reduce the need for distraction-subtraction is to not introduce unnecessary complexity into the organization. A practice that Stanford’s Bob Sutton refers to as mindless-addition. There’s a tendency for organizations to confront complexity with complexity. For example, creating new roles or functions. This actually increases coordination requirements making it more difficult for people to work effectively through cooperation (be agile). It’s generally better to keep structures simple so that it’s easy for people to choose cooperation. An excellent source for a deeper dive on this topic is Yves Morieux’s and Peter Tollman’s book Six Simple Rules. 

Sources: https://hbr.org/2012/04/the-new-science-of-building-great-teams

Connectedness is the infrastructure for information and learnings diffusion throughout the organization. Information tends to travel faster with more attention via peers/informal-channels. As a result, an important emerging practice is to purposefully nurture the business social network. Information diffusion efficiency is a function of proximity then medium (see Allen Curve). The increasing digitalization of the workplace has made it feasible to dynamically generate visual representations of the organization’s connection health. This can be used as a continuous improvement platform for building and strengthening the density and diversity of connections. Further, the same concept is used to engineer and self-correct high performance teams (see MIT Media Lab).

Organization

The fluid nature of adaptive organizations has inspired new interest for alternatives to functional structures. For example, the holarchy model is receiving much publicity.

In the interest of easing the path to adaptive adoption and providing an onramp for gaining experience with balancing reliability and adaptability, the example advocated here is a shared services model having three sub-function archetypes. Imbedded are generalists and specialized groups (scrum dev team for example) that serve on the cross-functional teams (experience and process teams). Center of excellence are functional specialists who serve as consultants and facilitate core operations. Service centers, having an efficiency mindset, facilitate transactional oriented tasks. 

Organizational Change

Cultures are complex systems. Building/changing a culture means creating the conditions that increase the probability that people will choose desired behaviors. Like software, the 1.0 version may only be a marginal improvement with unexpected consequences. A backlog of changes and refinements is expected. Like the other concepts described in this paper, it’s a knowledge building exercise that requires a systematic process of repeated hypothesis, minimum sufficient intervention, feedback, and refinement. Excellent sources for additional information are John Kotter and Mark Bonchek. 

Ideas with Action

There are three parts to the equation for effective innovation. These are experimentation proficiency, opportunity assessment accuracy, and execution dexterity. The strategic intent of the value creation pipeline is to create a continuously improving virtuous cycle of revealing superior insights for crafting higher yield solutions, reliability for selecting the highest potential opportunities, realizing the value of those superior solutions faster than competitors, and then achieve better reflective learnings to make each successive iteration easier. It’s a virtuous cycle if each iteration reduces friction and builds confidence for more ambitious undertakings.

Big “I” Innovation

The challenge that most organizations have is building a capacity for systematically increasing investment expectations and results. Fast big “I” innovation taps into a larger stakeholder community and leverages jointly located trans-disciplinary teams to concentrate innovation focus. It envisions assembling eco-systems to push feasibility toward the edge of the innovation frontier and designs asymmetric advantages through, for example, dynamic platforms that recruit/incentivize a wider range of stakeholders for network effects. The degree of cooperation and process rigor is commensurate with the distance to the innovation frontier (risk).

Small “i” Innovation

Ideally portfolios will balance innovation ambitions across a wider spectrum. This typically means a determined effort to achieve success with a few bolder/big “I” initiatives while still accommodating a large number of smaller/incremental initiatives. Well determined incremental efforts offer higher predictability for revenue increases which help to both fund and mitigate some of the risk associated with transformative investments.

Innovation Portfolio

Adopting a portfolio approach helps better optimize the value delivery pipeline. As the mesmerizing precision of predictive solutions for short term increases continue to improve, it’s likely to be even more of a challenge to build an appetite and competencies for the larger riskier investments. However, a penchant for predictability and precision will devour creativity and therefore adaptability. 

The first and most challenging link in the chain for bolstering innovation is gaining an insight advantage over the organization’s core customers. It should go without saying that a good strategy is to have strong specificity for which customers will be served (facilitates a deeper understanding). 

Insight Sources

A robust data supply chain for customer data improves the probabilities of surfacing important patterns and provides the precision for interpreting them. The economics of cloud storage and proficiencies of machine learning are motivating quests for a flourishing array of data sources and media. This goes beyond just behavioral data. Obviously, cultivating quality data sources is key to achieving an insight advantage. Data driven insights come fast and produce correlated behavior heuristics that can be repeatedly exploited. Empathy driven insights (Jobs2Bdone, Design Thinking…) come slower, reveal causal insights that lead to novel new innovations in relationships, experiences, and products. It’s a good means of discovering needs that customers don’t know they have. Then there are creative ways to co-opt customers into co-creation relationships that build intimacy, add value, while also building quality insights. For some, IoT can be creatively leveraged into a rich streaming data source with real-time test-&-learn potential. The key takeaway is that data is a prerequisite for insights and its quality is a function of deliberate efforts to engineer sources. Data supply chains distinguish organizational knowledge in a similar way that logistical sourcing and supply chains distinguish customer service.

Deriving Insights

Having a strong and continuously improving practice/methodology for deriving insights from data is what makes data valuable. The art is in the grasp of both the business problem space nuances and the data itself. The first helps with hypothesis generation and feature engineering, and the second with selecting relevant data for the context. For example, in retail, not eliminating one-time purchasers (one-and-done) which are upwards of 40% of interactions, could obscure or masquerade important insights. In general, the overall intent here is to accelerate the progression from mystery to heuristic and ultimately to algorithm.

Reflecting back on the architecture presented earlier, the use of instrumented journeys provides a context for prioritizing innovation focus, measuring effectiveness, and self-correcting on strategy. It’s touchpoints certainly facilitate effective incremental innovation while a periodic larger reflection of their purpose provides the opportunity for transformative change. For example, the later should be triggered by emerging general-purpose solution breakthroughs (like AI). This highlights the point that insights can originate from both problem-driven and solution-driven approaches. A commanding understanding of core customers offers an advantage for both approaches.

Since insights vary in significance, it’s important to find ways to maximize significance. In general, descriptive techniques reveal behind the scene patterns that, perhaps, may lead to new journeys and/or engagement heuristics (prediction features). Predictive techniques can help with classifying behavior patterns. There are many variations on the theme of exercising data for insights. It’s a vast and wondrous playground. However, the objective here is to create a proprietary means of producing powerful distinctive revelations with increasing speed. For example, building a brand unique lexicon of emotional motivators that can be widely applied for personalization.

Leveraging Insights

Insights are used to create ideas for improvements. The best ideas/concepts originate from a superior frame (job2Bdone or driving question) and a process that considers a wide breadth of creatively divergent ideas. Early stage innovation creative efforts deemphasize profitability and even feasibility in order to stretch the aperture of perspective in a way that liberates a rich collection of mass customizable ideas that can be synthesized into novel yet elegantly viable solution concepts. From a methodology standpoint Jobs2Bdone provides a strong approach for revealing causality from which a rich driving question can be articulated for engaging the creative power of Design Thinking. Unfortunately, a collective urgency for action and/or the fuzzy nature of the creative process (it’s departure from analytic rigor in particular) frequently undervalues this step by choosing the most practical option from a narrow range of considerations. This likely neutralizes investment yield and if accompanied by inflated expectations, inserts a level of risk into the value delivery pipeline that extends well beyond the scope of its own effort. The significance of bolstering this step is emphasized in many of the leading problem-solving and innovation methods. Two of which are mentioned above, and another is the emerging works of Dynamic Work Design (Donald Kieffer) which also further reinforces the imperative for breaking out of what Daniel Kahneman refers to as system-1 thinking. It’s this step that determines the proficiency for deriving impact potential from insights and formulating solution concepts that have the scaffolding for transformative potential. In the context of ACCIF, this is a critical domain for building distinguishing capabilities with core customers.

The ideation process seeks to strengthen the relationship between the problem space and a solution concept. It’s not an attempt to initially overwhelm a presumed problem-space unencumbered by the discipline of evidence. But rather, to nail an elegant fresh mental-model that, from the vantage point of core customers, establishes a solid footing at a root cause/need/desire. It’s from this launch-point that an MVP can best attract worthy insightful attention and then fruitfully iterate with authentic expectations while also gathering advocates.

The grand intent is to outfit the value pipeline with reaching/high-yield possibilities risk-buffered by incremental initiatives. This is optimization in favor of yield to produce a progressive incline in value volume output. Initially, the results may be disappointing but remember it’s a learning process. If it were easy, everyone would do it and it wouldn’t be a powerful differentiator. It’s what instructs and exercises effective learning while simultaneously building a critical core capability. Unfortunately, for well-established organizations there are formidable forces that tend to nominalize/relegate transformative concepts into a narrow familiar/comfortable spectrum. The yin/yang of the phenomena has to do with the pathological propensity to become victimized by success. It’s an ingrained relic from a rich history of punctuated equilibrium. Two helpful sources for level setting perspectives and increasing the probability for elevating outcomes is McKinsey’s sobering insights on power curve competition (Strategy beyond the hockey stick) and the R-W-W framework (George Day).

The next step seeks to increase the yield of the idea by revising the concept through an iterative applied creativity and value assessment process. This is where creative and analytical thinking need to complement each other. It’s a rapid series of iterations that seeks to optimize demand, features, and costs. This can be a powerful complimentary refinement step. However, it’s important that it doesn’t refine the innovation out of the idea/concept.

The next phase turns the concept into a solution. The value delivery pipeline is the circulatory system that pulls from the process of synthesizing insights to oxygenate solutions into existence (deliver impact). The objective in this phase is to accelerate value realization. For example, lean and agile methods are used to create an instrumented MVP. Using telemetry and other feedback sources, the MVP is rapidly navigated to a minimum sufficient state for subsequent exploitation. This process is initially patient for sales yet impatient for margin (Clayton Christensen).

Unlike a factory floor, measuring progress and process state for creative work is difficult to gauge/observe. A variety of tools can be used to render the process into visibly tangible form to facilitate both continuous improvement and capacity management. The throughput of the pipeline is a proxy for the pace of organizational learning. For the ACCIF, its proactively monitored and trained/conditioned to improve. A great source for an excellent perspective is Dynamic Work Design by Donald Kieffer and Nelson Repenning.

Adaptive Customer Centric Innovation Key Concepts

·      Customer Centered. A focus and alignment on improving customer capital with an outside-in orientation. Aims to build an organizationwide immersive understanding of and acute sensitivity to customers for the purpose of achieving an innovation advantage that leads to superior mutually rewarding relationships.

·      Value Cycle time. Accelerating the value creation process through shorter learning-2-value-delivery cycles. Cycle speed improvement is addressed by the use of lean and agile methods for orchestrating work. It leverages small self-managed cross-functional teams having accountability continuity for the full length of its value creation pipeline.

·      Value Yield. The amount of value generated per cycle. This comes from leveraging quality insights and creativity for framing/designing better investment choices. It leverages empathy driven methods to understand causality for richer insight into performance improvement dimensions. It also advocates a wider spectrum of initiatives to push the frontier of value achievement ambition.

·      Setup & Reallocation. The speed of team acclimation (Tuckman’s model), subject-matter assimilation, and access to resources. It’s also the speed of detecting the likelihood of failure and promptly reallocating resources to more promising endeavors.

·      Scaling. The use of horizontal scaling as an acceleration technique. It’s a partitioning scheme to enable parallel work streams having little to nominal overlap (clear fields of engagement). Scaling is also a knowledge sharing challenge. This aspect can improve by engineering social connection efficiencies.

·      Autonomy. The ability for parallel workstreams to operate with minimal external dependencies. In software vernacular these are high cohesion teams with low coupled external dependencies.

·     Adaptability. A means of making the value creation process more durable/sustainable (Vigilant value proposition/business-model relevance). An ability to rhythmically operate on multiple horizons and improvise toward emergent structures (change is continuous). 

·      Commitment Culture. Cultural elements that authentically inspire/motivate stakeholders to shed the encumberments of self-interest in favor of coalescing all energy toward advancing a larger cause. These are also key elements for enabling the speed of agile alignment across multiple autonomous workstreams operating in parallel.

·      Trust Culture. Management transparency toward embracing and encouraging the dynamics of a learning culture (safety for fast failure). Elevates participation and deemphasizing judgement to produce ideas having higher potential.

·      Stakeholder Empowerment. People are the organization’s most adaptable asset. Organizational adaptability originates from and spreads through people. Recognition that human talent is a chief differentiating asset that is most effective when liberated to more fully and creatively engage in the organization’ shared purpose through self-directed work.