The ECB’s Multipolar Drop // Radical Optionality // From Winners take all to a Variety of Protocols
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 really not miss.?Subscribe to the full newsletter?if you also want to access the curated links list in an organized way, and other perks.
Another two weeks have flown by, and it's time for some updates. So buckle up and let's dive into the latest happenings and discoveries at Boundaryless!
A few days ago we had an insightful podcast conversation (coming soon so stay tuned!) with? Lisa Gansky ?and? Bill Fischer ?(check out the previous episode?we had with them in the meantime). Lisa and Bill are two exceptional?mentors of Boundaryless?so we asked their help in making sense of the chaos currently characterizing markets (and society).?After all, to reinforce this feeling of continuous shifts, on April 17th?Christine Lagarde (European Central Bank's President) gave a speech titled?“Central banks in a fragmenting world”?that - former FT reporter turned independent journalist?Isabella Kaminska - dubbed as a?"big multipolar drop".
Kaminska - that reviewed the speech in an?incredibly insightful thread?- pointed out what seems to be a?change of regime?in policy, towards an age of multipolarity. According to Kaminska’s reading of Lagarde’s speech, Europe is?waking up to the need to reallocate its capital to build strategic resilience, in line with what actually seems to be a new age of?“economic warfare”.
This doesn't really come as a surprise for us. For example, we already covered the idea of what a16z calls "American Dynamism"?in a previous newsletter and the way we're witnessing a surge in investments in defense, space, and sovereign manufacturing is telling.?Things have shifted.
If you’ve some extra time and you want to catch up with this trend, listen to this podcast with Founder’s Fund Trae Stephens with Patrick O'Shaughnessy on what he calls?“finding good quests”?that at least will offer a perspective on the shift from a US-based point of view.
But what does this all mean for us? Radical Optionality
In a nutshell, we (and our organizations) must adapt to?structural instability?and to a landscape change that could be massive. We're no more in a?consolidation?phase: instead, markets are in?continuous flux. Businesses, managers, and entrepreneurs alike need to find new ways to respond. As Lisa pointed out during the podcast, the response must be?constructive and adaptive?as “there's no such thing as a fatalist entrepreneur"?(or organization, for that matter).
So, how should we tackle this challenge? One word:?optionality.
Optionality has long been a hot topic in the freelancers and entrepreneurial space, with thriving communities like Daniel Vassallo 's one focusing on building "a portfolio of small bets". Now it's time for organizations to jump on the optionality bandwagon! Last week, BCG’s Martin Reeves ,?our former podcast guest, co-authored a great piece called "Radical Optionality" (featured in the newsletter reads, check out the full newsletter) which landed on HBR – proving that optionality is a new kid on the block of management trends.
As usual, we were ahead of the curve. We've been discussing?organizational unbundling as a form of creating optionality for resilience?since late 2019 with the introduction of the?3EO Framework.?Dave Snowden even explained on our podcast?that the future of organizations lies in their ability to quickly and contextually cohere starting from relatively incohesive and unbundled structures, which are more adaptive.
During our podcast conversation, Fischer noted that - in this setting - organizations should be seen more as?opportunities (for individuals or teams) to find complementary capabilities?that could be useful to operate adaptive strategies than as contexts to?operate with certainty and be instructed on what to do,?according to a coherent plan.
As?power shifts from centralized organizations to smaller distributed units, teams, and individuals - we might have to consider joining?multiple ecosystems?as the new normal for producing value more reliably with less risk and fewer limitations.
If you can’t plan, it’s better to keep as many options open as you can possibly do.
Don't forget to check out our latest essay: Defining the Go-To-Market and Liquidity Approach for a Platform/Product Launch.
In this third post of a series on Platform Design Toolkit modular techniques - that make it the most versatile methodology to date to design, experiment, and grow platform strategies - we explain how to approach the go-to-market problem for a platform launch.
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Platforms, Protocols, and Optionality
Our ongoing research on protocols and platforms hints at how they can be instrumental in facilitating further the "unbundling" and disintegration of organizations for broader adaptability and optionality.
Protocols, for example,?can be helpful in creating coherence around enabling constraints?and can effectively help ecosystems emerge. While centralized platforms might seem more efficient, and rapid, when optionality becomes more important, adopting protocols and multiplying cooperation agreements may be more important than achieving a potentially large success with a single “platform” or initiative.
In this new setting, we may acknowledge that an organization that disintegrates capability and makes them easy to interact with can achieve more variety and maintain broader optionality. As we look with interest to protocols and other types of agreements as strategic tools for our organization we may have to leave aside the idea of replicating the “winners take all” platform playbook.
Maybe our protocols don’t need to become the "standard". Perhaps we can adopt existing protocols because they breed and encourage variety without the typical lock-ins of platforms.?At the end of the day, if we do not want some winner to take it all, we should let go of the idea that we can be the ones to win, and take it all.
The markets of the future may not look like the ones of today: instead of having to agree on a universal standard - irrespective of its legitimacy coming from network effects or particularly collaborative governance approaches - we should maybe focus on adopting and crafting protocols that cater to the unique needs of smaller niches and put more focus on how to build?adapters,?enact our strategies across different networks?and just?be fine with variety.
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