Best of Platform 2023 // Learning from global 3EO/Rendanheyi adoption // Attitudes, Aptitudes and How to Organize // Why Building On Chain
Dear readers,
Welcome back to our Boundaryless Dispatch. A fortnightly update where we connect the?trends?we spot, the?patterns?we identify,?and research threads from our backstage.
This dispatch is also available as the opening of our official newsletter The Rules of the Platform Game where you can also find 10-ish curated reads, videos, and podcasts with comments that you should not miss every two weeks.
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This dispatch has a lot for the reader starting from our historic end-of-the-year recap where you’ll find not only a highlight of the primers we produced this year - on the topic of platform design, portfolio management, organizational development, and more - but also tens of key reads and listens that you may have missed in the whirlwind of the day to day.
The year of convergence between product thinking and organizational development
On our side this has been a year during which we achieved a truly deep level of integration between our product design and business model innovation practice, historically linked to the platform design toolkit , and our organizational practice based on the 3EO framework .
As platform thinking has become pervasive in the product design and org development space, thinking about cross-product network effects, product extendability, composability, and product expansion is now at the same time a key topic for the small players - the startups - and one for the incumbents, often dealing with complex product and capabilities portfolios.
In a recent piece, exceptional pioneer of strategy and organizational development Simon Wardley (one who contributed to the democratization of this space with his Wardley Maps) wrote about how to organize yourself in this landscape.
Wardley gives a fantastic account of why the traditional, static, and monolithic ways we use too often for our organizational structures do not work in an evolutionary landscape.
He argues that, as organizations often work on different things that have different evolutionary characteristics, they need different attitudes. He uses the archetypes of:
In the piece, Wardley is very thoughtful, and rightly so, of the complicated cultural context that a transition towards a properly organized company may take. Perturbating an existing organizational complex with a new organizational model, he argues, is always a tremendous challenge.
In the piece, he makes the case for long-term transitions, relatively prudent changes, and the use of a centralized “intelligence” function that can provide the organization with some sort of guidance and a sparring partner that obliges all product teams to have an understanding of their customers and, more generally, situational awareness.
Learning from global practitioners in 3EO
Earlier this year, Boundaryless hosted the annual event dedicated to pioneers and global RenDanHeYi practitioners to assess their progress and share key learnings along their transformation journey.
The meeting has been an opportunity to explore different paths, strategies, and nuances toward becoming an Entrepreneurial Ecosystem Enabling Organization (3EO).
Attitudes and Aptitudes
In his piece, Wardley strongly focuses on attitudes as the key way to look at teams, and he makes it clear how different evolutionary stages will require different people, people who are somehow wired differently (see the colors below).
At Boundaryless we find it equally important and fascinating to consider aptitudes, or the capability to perform some specific tasks.
One thing that we know is that truly democratic and self-managed organizations (that can create optionality, diversity, and adaptability to today’s fast-changing world) can only be made if teams are truly capable of being autonomous in delivering a whole value proposition (featuring a diversity of aptitudes).
As we discussed earlier in one of our dispatches we have - indeed - found a tremendous resonance between Fred Emery’s work and our 3EO approach based on Rendanheyi. Emery clearly explains that an organization that wants to achieve an organic capability to adapt needs to drop an approach based on the Redundancy of Parts (meaning that whole organizational tasks are broken down into narrow, functional, and discrete jobs - as in bureaucratic structures) and adopt a Redundancy of Functions .
Through such a design pattern organizations create units that take responsibility for their coordination and control - the self-managing groups (SMGs) - where members are collectively responsible for meeting goals. This is what we could call, in today’s org jargon, a single-threaded or stream-aligned team or, even better, a Micro-Enterprise that bears its P&L responsibility.
What we recommend is to:
It’s clear that as certain units grow, a certain level of specification and coordination will emerge (inside of them): we can't just blindly say that every team needs to bear its positive P&L - and act as a micro-enterprise, optimizing for independent survival and thriving. If we just do that, we may inadvertently pose challenges to the organization's capability to scale: it would be like pushing the intrinsic need for hierarchy and coherence under the carpet.
领英推荐
Experimenting to find the right balance between specialization and autonomy
As we experiment with some of our customers we’ve indeed seen that something like SAFe (Scaled Agile Framework) - albeit with its contradictions - provides a structured approach to harmonizing the work of Agile Teams through larger size artifacts, such as Agile Release Trains and Large Solution Trains (set of teams that keep a certain coherence of delivery though shared epics). In our experience, SAFe - or comparable approaches - can be used to let teams specialize inside, for example, a certain product area (that can be represented by an ART, Agile Release Train) which could, in turn, be the place where P&L responsibility is enforced.
Adopting the approach of SAFe - which implies some synchronization overhead and flow and speed for coherence - is not the only approach. This can be dropped in favor of approaches that put less focus on coherence and more into optionality, open interfaces, and interdependence. Such an interface-based communication between organizational units was famously pioneered by Bezos with his famous internal email (API mandate) from 2002, stating:
As Wardley acknowledges in the piece the evolution in organizational structures will lead to something beyond the key but still limited EVTP model:
“I don’t know what it is but most of those interesting experiments are occurring in Chinese organizations. So keep an eye on organizations like Haier ."
His reference to Haier is significant in light of our 3EO framework for Entrepreneurial, Ecosystem-Enabling Organizations: a model which is exactly inspired by Haier's #Rendanheyi and developed in collaboration with the Haier Model Institute . A model that puts decentralization, responsiveness to market changes, and employee empowerment at the helm.
Thanks to Simon's reflections - a true visionary and champion of evolution in organizational design - we once more feel that we’re going in the right direction and that the 3EO is not only a possibility in an organization landscape of choices but, rather, the right way to go in 2024.
So let’s take a chance to wish you all that 2024 will bring you more experimentation in building organizations that are ready for the 21st Century!
Preview from the blog
The Best Reads on Platforms from 2023
Structure of the piece
This year’s selection presents first a review of what we delivered at Boundaryless in terms of primer articles and podcast episodes, then goes into a series of thematic sections that recap some of the key reading and listening threads we curated all over 2023. The sections cover key ideas that surfaced during 2023 about:
?? Read the rest of the article on our blog , to discover the various ways to facilitate product bundling and empower customers to choose what products they want to use.
Why Building On Chain: The Case for Web3 with Jesse Walden
In this episode , we discuss the future of the internet with Jesse Walden - Founder of Variant Fund and Web3 legend. Jesse - is one the most pivotal shapers of the landscape of user-owned internet - and an early-stage crypto funding pioneer - and we are truly honored to have him speak with us.
Key points we covered:
Work with us
Boundaryless provides on-demand consulting services with an iterative and outcome-based approach. We iterate fast and produce results quickly. We work with organizations of all kinds, from Fortune 500 to small startups, and even the UN!
For?startup or project teams, we help with:
For?larger companies?that are a bit more mature, we also work on:
Are you facing these and other challenges? Let's discuss how we can help: