Emergent IT for Competitive Superiority

Emergent IT

Emergent IT uses the rising wake of digital innovation, the dynamic nature of complex adaptive systems, and an obsession for remarkable customer encounters to configure transformational advantages in value creation. Pulling together principles from complexity science and systems thinking with prevailing approaches to systems engineering and organizational design to offer a holistic perspective for making complexity useful in a world where it’s increasingly abundant.

?Recognizing that sustainable differentiation comes from being the best source of new value creation, Emergent IT forms and strengthens customer connections by relentlessly advancing the organization's shared purpose through progressively enlightened incarnations of value propositions. By making the customer engagement system ground zero for emergence, it improvises complexity to nurture a continuous flow of transformative value. Always leading with an aspiring (yet evolving) evidence driven hypothesis, Emergent IT learns to thrive in a near-perpetual state of transition.

The following provides some background/context around the motives for Emergent IT. Then the subsequent sections (Flow, Architecture, and Competencies) describe the core concepts for enabling the notion of Emergent IT.

Continuous Transformation

The exponential growth of digital innovation will continue to accelerate the demand for more inspired value propositions and customer experiences. This same growth trajectory is also injecting power-curve dynamics into competitive venues where only a few brands are allowed to prosper. Becoming and remaining one of those brands requires an innovation fitness for repeatedly designing and executing bolder moves. This inevitably elevates the practice of continuous incremental improvement to continuous transformation. It’s not often that an organization successfully ideates and executes at a transformative level.

Unfortunately, many transformation efforts were ill-fated neglected responses to already deteriorated situations. Conditions are conspiring to suggest a proactive approach that can make the process of transformation less ominous. A way that progressively builds confidence while advancing the competencies that increase the impact of value at an accelerating rate. It makes explicit what we’re all already striving to conquer: to design and navigate an evolving architecture of investments and organizational change that achieves the highest aggregate transformative impact with the least unintended consequences. As a result, acquiring the capacity to do that well, is among the first bold moves to take on.

Systems Complexity

The digital age means that we are all becoming pervasively interconnected within a complex and diverse open-system that’s always changing (the matrix of our own creation). As brands, our interactions with customers have evolved from point-in-time transactional events to connected relationships and experiences that give richer identity to value. The “product” is elevating to a system for which we invite customers to engage. This customer engagement system is where some portion of the customer and the brand overlap to exchange various forms of value (which also fuels insights for new value creation possibilities). Customer centricity makes this engagement system the center of empowered action and persistent determined innovation. Because the “product” is a system, it provides enough abstract creative freedom for ongoing meaningful differentiation. However, sustainable differentiation comes from the positional advantage of being the best perpetual source of new value for the combination of the brand’s shared-purpose and the target customer constituencies it’s aimed at. The potential of which is shaped by features like, because customer journeys prefer circuitous paths, the brand’s relationship/relative-advantage to virtuous ecosystems of other complimentary customer engagement systems.

As brands, we are complex systems operating within and among other complex systems, all of whom, are always changing. As a result, the impact of even small diverse changes in this densely meshed eco-system can have disproportionately large unpredictable effects. It’s no longer news that brand survival requires engagement systems to continually evolve/adapt. However, to thrive, engagement systems require an elevating trajectory in brand purpose to attract larger/smarter opportunities/ideas for differentiated value and a distinguishing ability to organize complexity to realize them.

Pioneering Agility

The principles of Agility are propagating beyond the domain of software development to envelop the architecture and ways-of-working across the enterprise. The influence of escalating disruptive externalities is increasing the scope, priority, and expectation of agile transformation initiatives in the hope of providing the malleability and resiliency for combating uncertainty. Beyond improving probabilities for moderating or coexisting with the impact of disruption, the value of agility is more potent when it goes on the offensive to advance aspiring strategic moves. Fundamentally, an adaptive organization can more successfully transform uncertainty into opportunity. Its real strength is the ability to consistently deliver novel outcomes aligned on strategic intent. By leveraging agility in pioneering ways, adaptive organizations shift themselves further upstream from the burgeoning sources of pedestrian disruption to receive the virtuous gains/benefits in strategic options and share of resources for successive transformations. Essentially, by focusing on transforming what distinguishes their identity/purpose, they gain both the momentum to outmaneuver and antibodies to immunize themselves from the adverse effects of disruption.

Emergent Change

Emergent change is a powerful force in the creation and evolution of complex systems. As the pace of change accelerates and systems become increasingly capable (complex), the more relevant emergence is to an adaptive value delivery advantage. Often complex systems are substantially influenced by bottom-up emergence. Unfortunately, emergence is at least as likely to work against transformation efforts as it is to help. Traditional reductive approaches to transformative change move too slow and tend to adversely distort intended outcomes as they propagate closer to the customer. In fact, emergence, which innately moves faster from many simultaneous directions, frustrates and can eventually overcome even the most insistent attempts at imposing structured/predictable outcomes. What’s needed is a reverse approach. One that produces prolific change from small amounts of well-directed energy (minimum sufficient interventions), can propagate outward from a customer centered origin, and remains spontaneous to new information while in the midst of change. Although emergence can’t be controlled, through attention to starting-conditions and a few other principles, it may be summoned and nudged to respond favorably.

Complexity science demonstrates that the continued rise of complex systems is making traditional approaches to strategy, ridged predictions of outcomes, more often futile. While, at the same time, making it increasingly viable/preferable to fluidly invent aspiring future states and leverage emergence to produce working versions. So, how can IT help an organization improve its probabilities of remaining competitively vibrant in destabilizing environments? Adaptability is certainly part of the answer. However, a goal more commensurate with leveraging emergence might be to stimulate ambitions for and give flight to more pioneering ideas. For example, a more capable value delivery engine. One that innovates better ideas for demand, with and ahead of customers, while leveraging emergence too rapidly transform into them.

Flow

Flow represents the value delivery supply chain and the organizational congruence necessary to evolve and ensure its continuity. The goal of engineering complex adaptive systems (CAS) is a system that thrives in unpredictable environments. This process doesn’t necessarily offer a solution for improving the delivery of predicted outcomes with specificity. That rarely occurs and, for reasons discussed earlier, is unlikely to improve. Rather, this process can offer a superior flow of improving value that is more likely to impact-fully shape and apprehend the intent of strategic aspirations.

Emergent IT is fueled by big ideas divergently synthesized from an evidence driven approach to customer obsession. The flow process leads with customer centricity because it’s an intuitively expressive/actionable metaphor for deriving prolific action, a highly sensing source of important change signals, and provides robust explanatory benefits. Flow is the core process for producing new value from idea formulation to realization. It’s conceptualized here as a simple model, a way of thinking about how it works and can be systematically improved. The components that make up flow can be thought of as a non-linear (exponential) equation where each component is a lever for adjusting the volume of value. To simplify end2end optimization it is implemented as a pull system. The initial priority is uninterrupted continuity which should reveal the actual scope/boarders of the needed transformation (for example, it may bring the resource allocation process into consideration). Once a stabilized rate of flow is achieved, the process is continuously improved to progressively higher levels. The measurement theme is the consistent rate of value throughput and its impact on the customer portfolio using lead indicators. Estimates of value should ultimately correlate with the level of structural change (system) proposed by an endeavor from an outside-in perspective. Systems theory and complexity science informs us that emergence is triggered by change imperatives that fundamentally destabilize the fitness of a complex system. So, when a big idea gives rise to a new shared mental model that substantially clashes with the status-quo at a structural-level, emergence can be inclined to achieve its intent.

Better Ideas

This represents a value rendering capacity for building high potential improvement/investment portfolios. The hope for the investment portfolio is an increasing circumference and density of ideas that impact those aspects of customer lives for which the organization’s purpose assumes innovation responsibility. Better ideas don’t necessarily mean bigger in resources and risk, they’re boldly smarter ideas. Often times they are the elegant ideas that come from unconventional sources or rare spontaneous epiphanies.

Where the broad adoption of Agile has provided excellent how-to guidance for accelerating the path from hypothesis to value in the form of progressively informed renditions of working software, similar definitive guidance for how to systematically synthesize impactful hypotheses (beyond the hurdle of incremental improvement) is still largely elusive. Specifically, high-impact ideas on the order of an abductive leap. When they do arise, to gain approval without dilution, they tend to require a value-driven risk assessment venue adept at evading false-negatives. There is, however, robust guidance in the way of creative methods (Design Thinking, Jobs2Bdone, Blue Ocean…) and for what a strong portfolio might look like (RWW framework, 3-Horizons, Strategy beyond the Hockey Stick…). But an overall apparatus that distinguishes an ability to repeatedly innovate ahead of customers will likely be proprietary. This points to securing a level of customer access and means of understanding that others can’t. As a result, of all the components of flow, improvements in this capability (Better Ideas) can have the most favorable disproportionate impact and competitively asymmetric effect. Some action items that may help bolster innovation outcomes:

·?????Nudge a collective compulsion for customer obsession. Elevate the notion of the organization’s customer ecosystem and personas from narratives or dashboards to digital twins and make it the centerpiece for learning and inspired action.

·?????Gain and leverage an analytics advantage for the intersection of the organization’s purpose and its target customers. For example, monetize proprietary insights to recruit collaborative synergies (more prolific journeys/solutions) with adjacencies (external complementary engagement systems).

·?????Create more robust two way connections to accelerate the evolution of mutual value toward an equilibrium. At a product level (IoT for example) to efficiently understand and service performance gaps or specialize; and at the customer level to fuel spontaneous innovation for next generation value formulas.

·?????Aim at (think in terms of) transforming customers within the context of the organization’s purpose. This emphasizes a mastery of the customer problem space (motives/drivers/the dimensions of why) over anecdotal correlations/associations (what). It also stretches the impact potential of the solution space. For example, if the solution doesn’t require a plan to shift mental models of customers, it’s probably not transformative (nor is the ultimate value).

?In addition to portfolio quality, this capability needs to maintain/scale sufficient inventory and funding for uninterrupted flow to downstream delivery/execution demand.?It will also need a consistent value scoring algorithm to facilitate prioritization (building potent roadmaps) and support continuous improvement. Lastly and most fundamentally, an effective practice for framing, structuring, and learning from discovery oriented initiatives.

?The wake of digital innovation and infrastructure not only brings more innovation options to solution spaces, it’s also expanding the diversity of relevant perspectives/specializations involved in assessing problem spaces and deriving quality ideas for solutions. Although this improves the probabilities of synthesizing impact-fully elegant and disruptive solutions, it also increases the threshold of mastery/experience to do so. It’s not just the rise of complex systems that simultaneously liberate and complicate product innovation, customer constituencies are dividing into smaller and more diversified (tribal) groups. Solutions need features that both unite and personalize in order to generalize. Fortunately, demanding performance criteria is useful for enriching creativity. In effect, creativity is a form of emergence sparked by a divergence in cognitive perspectives (reaching beyond the intuitive) confronting challenges having a dichotomy of tensions (wicked problems).

Faster Execution

Achieving faster value realization is a function of how well opportunities are fluidly pulled from the portfolio to orchestrate roadmaps having the most potential to expedite aggregate value, and the speed with which execution resources are choreographed to extract the value. In this context, success means to navigate quickly to demonstrable/measurable progress via working products or promptly abort and redistribute resources to the next high value pursuit. This competency is able to field high-performance teams, decompose ideas into stories, and produce working products in short iterations. It regulates flow/capacity in a way that nominalizes wait-time and WIP. It uses rhythms to coordinate/sync activities across teams/stakeholders and leverages simple rules for facilitating inter and intra team cooperation.

?Scaled agile and lean practices coexist well with the features of and organizational congruence for emergence. From a pure software engineering perspective (like for continuous improvement), there are ample sources/guidance about improving the practice of software delivery speed via continuous pipelines. Many organizations are currently engaged with some form or hybrid of the prevailing paradigms rooted in lean and agile. Its accelerating toward ubiquity, roles are largely consistent/transferable, and the class of tools more widely known and adopted. Where the “Better Ideas” component of the flow equation (above) offers some blue-ocean/differentiating maneuvering room, “Faster Execution” is becoming more of a red-ocean essential. Digital innovation continues to advance new tools and platforms with increasing functional capability while abstracting away technical complexity. Reenforcing the notion that advantage is more likely found in uniqueness somewhere upstream within customer centricity.

?As the delivery process is increasingly used as an enabler for opportunity exploration, building proprietary know-how starts to look more optimistic. Discovery expeditions are a way to break into new territories of potential, harvest deeper insights and data sources, and pathfind/probe challenging scenarios. These are powerful intelligence and experience gathering tactics that clarify execution options (resolve the best path forward) by shrinking uncertainty. Talents most likely to offer differentiation are those that uniquely strengthen teams and their environments. For example: Assimilating/harmonizing a wider and more refined repertoire of emerging technologies and cognitive disciplines, optimally configuring team talent composition and engagement approach based on the nature/intent of discovery exercises, and reenforcing an improvisational culture that’s proficient with the edge-of-chaos.

Smarter Evolution

This represents a superior ability to evolve the flow process as the organizational system grows in complexity. This obviously means that the flow process is well instrumented for continuous improvements across all aspects that affect performance outcomes. However, of particular interest is creating a digital tailwind for continuous transformation of the continuous improvement system itself. Early on, this capability will be key to nudging the flow transformation effort to a consistent target rate. Quickly surfacing, triaging, and resolving the impediments to flow. The shape this capability takes varies with the particulars of each organization. However, here are a few universal practices that can help proactively combat the more insidious forms of friction buildup:

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Elevate. Continuously shift the balance of energy and elevate individual focus to/for new value creation. As digital accelerates, so do opportunities to elevate and force multiply individuals. This produces more than a simple linear improvement (large payback). It unlocks cognitive engagement levels to maximize human contribution and overall adaptive potential.

?Autophagy. When it comes to change, organizational systems tend to have more diligence around adding than conscientiousness for subtracting. People, for multiple reasons, hold-onto things (including information). Create a habit of converting dysfunctional habits into useful energy. ?

?Negentropy. It takes a conscious ongoing effort to stave off the onset of entropy as a complex system grows. Improvements to CAS often come by way of provocation. Organizations tend to become more insular as they grow (for example, hiring practices that specialize on culture-fit over culture-add). When sources of mutation/decent decline, adaptiveness atrophies and negative-emergence produces complex ridged/immovable structures. It’s important to preserve/increase the engagement of diversity. ?

Simplify. Where creating sources of cognitive diversity is something to strive for in CAS, the reverse is true for unnecessary technology diversity/variation. This can become an unchecked source of friction to agility and flow. Take advantage of opportunities to simplify the technology portfolio through standardization.

?Ideally, these universal traits are built-in as reoccurring (even spontaneous) individual and group encounters, as opposed to a detached/oversight function. The organization, at the individual level, learns to recognize (even seek out) and follow-through on these often unnoticed endurance building opportunities. As a result, they’re credible traits of an accountability framework.?

Architecture

?Architecture refers to the system of tools, teams, and simple-rules that come together to produce/change complex systems. The intent of this architecture is to provide just enough framework for enabling the flow process to rapidly produce complex systems by leveraging emergence. Emergence is new system level phenomena from new ways of connecting components together.

It’s provoked by the interactions/sense-making among many micro-level components (teams), in response to an unfit system, where each simultaneously differentiate locally while cooperating globally with a larger process. In this case the components are autonomous self-organizing teams who take ownership of some portion of the solution (component). There are ample sources of externalities/disruption that make systems unfit. Preferred sources include bold new ideas that the organization has a hand in originating. Once a new idea evolves into a future-state mental-model and is generally accepted, the associated existing systems essentially become unfit. The amount of energy required to change them depends on the amount of complexity that must be reorganized. The complexity that at one moment was a fit robust solution/advantage can instantly become a complex obstacle to future ambitions. As a result, since change is accelerating, architecture matters a lot. Some key features to consider for an architecture follow (from a CAS perspective). The features are consistent with some scaled agile frameworks and compliment modern organizational congruence paradigms that advocate purpose, autonomy, mastery, connection, servant leadership…

?Macro Context. The engagement system is the macro level system/solution and unifying context for its components. As an example, it could consist of three layers: customer journey(s), engagement system layer, and platform infrastructure layer. The journey level is used to convey engagement intent from a customer perspective. The engagement system layer models the software systems that instantiate the customer journey’s digital products and experiences. It’s a conceptual architecture of bounded domains where each map to an autonomous development/component team.

?Autonomous Teams. Central to the architecture is autonomous engagement among self-organizing teams. Each team is capable of building its own backlog and producing working software components. The portfolio level team has responsibility for building the macro system level backlog/portfolio. Architecture teams integrate the macro/portfolio and micro/component teams. Teams are also formed for other purposes, for example, discovery engagements. A diversity of perspectives (cognitive diversity) in and among teams is critical for positive emergence. It's diversity that enables a system to effectively adapt through mutation. In fact, if the ability to mutate is allowed to decline over time, the system will drift further away from relevance (increasingly delusional) with each evolution.

?Component Independence. Initial design is a large part of establishing starting conditions for an emergent development effort. Complex systems are sensitive to their starting conditions (small changes have a large downstream effect). Champion technologies and design patterns that liberate independence among system components (coupling/cohesion). The design should empower the emergence process through autonomy and cooperation. Specifically, it needs to enable many autonomous teams to progress in parallel with a minimum of cross-team interference (dependencies). For example, DDD, microservices, and event streaming can be conducive to adaptive complexity. This enables both the solution and development capacity to scale. Ideally, each team is associated with a coherent component identity giving them maximum latitude and uninterrupted flow to evolve local functionality while also elevating its generalizable options for new cooperative interactions (global functionality). It’s important to only introduce minimal design/order/control since it constrains emergence. Aim at maximum latitude for creative freedom but also enough guidance to nudge global intent (so components can find a global optimum).

?Team Interdependence. Since emergence depends on new ways of connecting components together, communication between teams is critical. Create effective ways for teams to share diverse ideas, diffuse information, and cooperate (for example, simple-rules for interactions and psychological safety to encourage meaningful exchanges). As the potential for connections among components increase, so does emergence. Find ways to connect teams to sources of diverse perspectives. Watch for system level patterns to form. As desirable patterns emerge, promote them in a way that makes it preferable to adopt over reinvent. This creates a tipping point for emergence to rapidly coalesce new ordered-states. A property of CAS is that new emergent ordered-states coalesce from apexes of chaotic sense-making.

?Rhythms. Rhythms are an effective means for synchronizing a choreographed delivery process. For example, larger reoccurring process intervals or phase transitions. An important rhythm in large scale CAS development is the feedback oscillation pattern between chaos (development) and order (demos). The cycle is how the system evolves and progress is measured. The goal is to achieve the right balance between order and chaos where components are the most adaptable. It’s also the point where creative innovation peaks without losing sight of utility (edge-of-chaos).?

?Digital Tailwind. Although the speed of digital is driving up the frequency of change, it’s also innovating new tools and platforms to help manage it. Look for new technological ways to shrink the level of development effort. Higher levels of abstraction narrow the gap between the solution and the work required to achieve it. It also enables more alternatives to be explored to increase fit.

Competencies

The value capabilities quadrants relate IT capabilities to the key drivers of improving flow (better ideas executed faster). The ultimate intent is to build portfolio and execution strength by developing and projecting value creation and delivery capabilities into all four quadrants.

Many begin their transformation journey somewhere in the bottom left and then work upward and outward. A specific approach depends on the situation and objectives. It’s instructive to use the current backlog to capture the current state focus. Then, considering the organization’s future-state aspiration (H2), estimate which quadrants will need to be emphasized. If aspirations are bold enough, that should extend out into all quadrants. However, as an alternative/default, there are usually opportunities to bulk-up the vision and portfolio by engaging the right side of the matrix while simultaneously addressing the starting-conditions for speed and scale (flow, architecture, organizational congruence, and talent impediments).??

?Horizontal Spectrum. The right half (Exploring) represents proficiency in acquiring and applying new leverage-able insights and know-how for exploiting bigger opportunities. The left half (Exploiting) is about escalating execution proficiency in less ambiguous problem spaces (rapidly navigating to a target end-state). Complexity increases from left to right as the goal of the initiative becomes more discovery oriented which necessarily changes the complexion of the engagement (team/disciplines, approach, and outcomes) toward detecting and synthesizing value from increasingly uncertain opportunity spaces. These are highly instrumented engagements for learning and may take circuitous routes to reveal important features and dynamics within a given opportunity space. Because their destination is abstract, discovery initiatives tend to require strong stopping rules. Initiative outcomes on the left aim to provide imminent value in the form of finished systems. Outcomes on the right can result in immediate value, new initiatives, or/and more fully framed/qualified opportunities for the left.???

?Vertical Spectrum. The top half (Reaching) represents scaling execution speed and dexterity to larger complex systems (top left) and imposing a more determined discovery presence within an opportunity space (top right). Engaging the top-half, although more expensive, yields long stride (multivariate) increases in value discovery and delivery capabilities. The bottom-half are more focused engagements where the left is at a continuous improvement scale and the right may include experiments to excavate new knowledge concerning customers, technologies, disciplines/skills, products, and/or other targeted concepts. ??

Summary

The goal for an Emergent IT transformation is to embrace a journey toward enabling the organization to repeatedly (relative to others in its space): Frame better ideas/investment decisions, execute them faster (than others do their inferior ones), providing superior fit and experiences (design/architecture), while learning/gaining more leverage-able insights/experience to advance successive iterations further ahead. Where the generalized purpose of IT goes something like:

?First, to ensure an appropriate and resilient technology and IT services architecture that elevates decision quality, facilitates operational excellence, safeguards data assets, and encourages continuous improvement to thrive. Second, and at least as important, is to have an evolved point-of-view around how the rapidly accelerating digital frontier can be further exploited to advance the organization and its customers to their next horizon of aspirations. Third, do it in an ethical, human enriching, environmentally sustainable, socially conscience…

Emergent IT doesn’t subtract anything from the generalized purpose, but it does add vigor around: a customer centric obsession to not only lead the organizations’ competitive realm, but also a commitment to incarnate its purpose just a bit north of what’s generally considered feasible on the desirability spectrum.