The Dual Operating System: How Design Leaders Can Chart The Future While Delivering For Today

The key to driving innovation at scale isn’t a skunkworks team, it’s creating runway through delivery credibility.

I’ve led both R+D/innovation labs and large-scale experience design organizations, and the most successful teams use a dual operating system — optimizing the current business model while exploring new opportunities. If you structure your teams and work this way, you can provide a strong vision of the future while improving current experiences in market today. This is what gives you the space and time to drive innovation, it gives you runway.

Runway is required to deliver best in class experiences — this is how you can achieve it.

Step 1: Establish a dual operating system.

This is the core to driving business agility.

You need to carve out capacity to exploit current business models (running the business) while exploring new ones (creating the business). The exploitation side of the system still uses hierarchy and process focused on optimization, growth, and scaling, and the exploration side uses a network model with an orientation to customer need and product-market fit. To go deeper, I recommend three books: XLR8, Building The Agile Business Through Digital Transformation, and Doing Agile Right.

An important part of establishing this OS is to make sure you align the right type talent to the distinct roles.

It’s easy to say “we want to be the Apple of X”. But it’s much more difficult to create the conditions for innovation to thrive. Everything from your org chart, operating model, and guiding principles, to decision rights and culture need to foster customer-focused innovation to achieve that aim.

Once you have the structure and talent, the next step is where to focus.

Step 2: Create three areas of focus: Continuous Optimization, Next Gen Experiences, and Innovation Portfolio.

I’ve driven innovation in a wide spectrum of environments. Some where R+D is embedded and invested in, sparking inspiration for a global enterprise, others where reinvention is the way to innovation, and some where you have to clearly establish the business opportunity (in billions) to have the runway to experiment on anything beyond the next quarter of delivery. This model can work in any of them.

No matter where you are, there’s a balance that needs to happen.

You can define the experience vision, showcasing a holistic view of what the future can hold for a company’s products and services, creating new business models and adjacent industry opportunities. And you can also optimize current experiences for conversion, engagement, retention, and LTV. Lean too far into the present, and you’ll only be driving short-term thinking and results. Lean too far into the future and you’ll create visions that looks great in presentations but the tech constraints can’t currently support them and no one knows the path to get there.

As a design leader, you need to do both.

Human-centered design is a phenomenal methodology for driving product and service innovation. Especially in 0 to 1 environments where you are bringing v1 to market. But when people get enamored with the North Star, they lose sight of delivering for today.

Here are the three focus areas and a model of how to split your capacity:

• Focus #1: Continuous Optimization. Iteration of current experiences in market to target experience. Carve off 20–30% of your capacity for this work.
• Focus #2: Next Gen Experiences. Net new experiences, features, redesigns, and convergence building towards an established North Star. One of your key speed enablers is your design system. Spend 50–60% of your capacity here.
• Focus #3: Innovation Portfolio. Exploring new business models, experiences, and emerging technology. 10–20% capacity.

Even after you’ve defined the North Star experience, work on the experience roadmap to get there. The next gen experiences become the 1–2 year out work, and the continuous optimization evolves experiences in the 3–12 month timeframe.

Step 3: Measure what matters.

Benchmark your current experiences. Define the metrics for success. Establish dashboards, report out monthly.

While it sounds simple, measurement will be clunky at the beginning but so worth it.

This step is required to set the foundation for reporting out on the progress you’re making and how you’re driving the business. Done well it will also enable you to connect the dots across your operating system and give visibility to the awesome work being done across the company. Take the time to get it right.

Charting the future while delivering for today is critical for success as a design leader — the dual operating system will help you get there.