Thought Experiment #37: Head of Platforms

tl;dr Firstly, platform thinking has to transcend beyond ‘products’ and into people-, problems-, and purposes-as-a-platform. Secondly, platform-based thinking needs to permeate every type of organisation.

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In previous posts, I explored how:

• Head of Experimentation and Head of Problems roles can address the failure of innovation functions,
• Head of Stories can support marketing to impact top-line,
• Director of Failure can add higher value to the project management function,
• Head of Customer Learning can redefine customer relationships,
• Head of Mindshifts can inspire learning and development departments.

In this post, the last of the new-roles series (before the eventual book), I explore the role of “Head of Platforms” and how it can and should redefine all types of organisations.

This post is to help those who either have this role (the title at least) or those that don’t yet have it, to create a better, shared understanding and articulation of the role’s potential and scope.

There is no one, single definition of what constitutes the term platform. In general, a platform includes allowing, facilitating and incentivising for 'others' to build on top of your organisation.

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The most valuable companies in the world, such as Amazon, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, are all platform companies. That’s old news. What’s new is that we have moved from ‘every company is an IT company’, to the current status quo where ‘every company is a media company’, to early market signs that ‘every company is a platform company’.

Yet, firstly, this platform thinking has often not transcended beyond ‘products’ (read: tech). Secondly, platform-based thinking needs to permeate every type of organisation.

We can think of all institutions (not just corporates) from countries, governments and schools to start-ups as a platform:

• Country-as-a-platform: A country is the biggest ‘platform’ of them all – with its borders, laws, institutions, and infrastructure which serve citizens to connect, collaborate, live, and invest to create value upon. Country-as-a-platform thinking can challenge what it means to be a country. For example, Estonia’s e-residency program allows others ‘outside’ the country to build on top of the functions that exist inside the country.
• Government ministry-as-a-platform: Government ministries, from police to social security, are historically inside-out driven. Yet, there isn’t enough expertise in any one ministry to leverage the data, insights, problems, opportunities, and challenges that they all face. For one thing, they all require legislation to operate, yet the formulation of regulation is a slow process in every country. For example, in the UAE, the cabinet-as-a-platform approach enables the RegLab to allow, facilitate, and incentivise other stakeholders (other than only government entities) to be the drivers, rather than mere passengers, of new legislation. Platform-based thinking needs, to paraphrase Abdulla Bin Touq, to “embrace ambiguity” on what will work and what won’t. Just like lean startups, even legislation needs to iterate its way to successful impact.
• School-as-a-platform: Schools are still largely defined by physical buildings and the teachers and subjects inside them. Even though there is widespread recognition that schools aren’t fit for the 21st century, change is difficult. That’s because it is risky to stray from what is perceived to be the core function as it was defined, in the case of schools, over 100+ years ago. For example, in the US and Finland there are schools operating as schools-as-a-platform - to allow, facilitate, and incentivise local businesses and parents and other talent to build on top of what the school is doing - so that real-world learning is not a once-a-year opportunity but a default.
• Start-up-as-a-platform: Platform-based thinking isn’t something you necessarily work on after you’ve achieved the Minimum Viable Product. Platform-based thinking is as much a mindset as it’s operational. For example, Eric Schmidt, the executive chairman of Google, recently wrote that tech firms have to be ready to partner “fairly early”. He gave the example of a start-up that wants to build homecare robots. “The market for homecare robots is going to be very, very large. The problem is that you need visual systems, and machine-learning systems, and listening systems, and motor systems, and so forth. You’re not going to be able to do it with three people”, he said.

Every type of organisation can and should embrace platforms.

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Before we delve deeper into the job spec of a Head of [your org name]-as-a-platform allow me to reflect on three ‘dots’, a mix of observations, frustrations, and insights, which when connected together, were the catalyst for penning this post.

• Dot one: “We have an open-innovation role – we are therefore already a platform company” Not quite. As I see it, most of the open innovation initiatives are still all about the organisation seeking solutions from the inside-out, through the likes of crowdsourcing or partnerships or hackathon initiatives. Even crowdsourcing relies on the internal organisation to spot and recognise the right problems and in reality, many organisations are slow at articulating the right problems. The Head of Platforms is seeking to address the reverse, outside-in approach.
• Dot two: The mindset of less, not more: The embedded mindset is that companies launch ‘more’ new products. Governments launch ‘more’ new concepts as a provider-of-services. All this ‘more’ comes at a cost, either in terms of money or bureaucracy. We need to ask a different question: what can we do less of and enable others to do more of? To put it another way, every good strategy means being clear on what you are saying ‘no’ to – what markets, problems, opportunities you are not pursuing. Yet this ‘no’ can be opened up to others to build on top of your distribution, credibility, and brand. In short, platform thinking is about increasing the size of the pie for all to benefit from, rather than increasing the organisation's share of the pie.
• Dot three: ‘Not invented here’ often gets rejected: To service a recent request, we proposed 12 potential experiments that a national agency could run. Our internal sponsor acknowledged that all 12 would make worthwhile experiments but in the end the national agency accepted zero. They were rejected for numerous reasons, many of which were unsaid but they consisted of some variation of: 1) don’t know where it fits in with our strategies, 2) it’s too risky, 3) it won’t work because of xyz, without any evidence, 4) don’t have the skill sets, capabilities, or time to execute it, or 5) don’t have the budget. Most ‘good’ external ideas will die inside most organisations. ‘Bad’ ideas (in terms of lack of outcomes) will survive because they are safe, expected, easier to communicate, can be packaged with existing mental models, have an anchor with past experiences, can be wrapped around existing narratives, or are easier to communicate through a neat plan. Organisations are limited by their mandates, their biases, their history, and their existing constraints-based thinking. Platform thinking seeks to overcome these barriers, by providing deliberate interfaces into the organisation.

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Having set the context, now let’s dive into the job-spec.

Just as organisations create application-programming interfaces (APIs) to allow other developers to build on top of their applications the job of Head of [your org name]-as-a-platform is to create organisational-programming-interfaces (OPIs).

In short, the Head of [your org name]-as-a-platform’s job is to turn people, problems, products, and purpose into platforms.

These four interfaces, may be at different levels of maturity, you don’t need them all at once, and as an organisation you need to determine the right portfolio mix for your context and needs.

Yet, there is even greater potential to turn the whole organisation into a platform. Why? Because, an organisation is more than the sum of just its products used by customers to get a job done. It is also its purpose in the future it is seeking to create. It is also the ecosystem of people who it engages, touches, inspires, and changes. And, it is also the problems it exists or seeks to solve.

1) People

Today, most organisations still have the entrenched, industrial-era mindset, structures, and processes when it comes to leveraging people-as-a-platform. The default approach of getting work done inside most organisations is through employees, vendors/suppliers, and partners. In all these cases, the scope is very well defined in terms of job spec, RFP, and partnership/SLA agreements, respectively.

The potential of people ‘out there’ is obvious, and doesn’t need further investigation. It’s neatly articulated by the CEO of P&G, “You can’t possess all the science and brilliant minds … In our R&D organisation we have 7,500 people in 150 science areas, but there are 1.5 million high-quality people outside P&G. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that if you can engage the brains of your 7,500, plus the key ones from that 1.5 million, you can build better products.”

The question then becomes how do you engage with these ‘people’ outside your organisation, in a scalable and sustainable way? 

These are the typical models of engagement with people outside the organisation. The least explored is what I call co-creators.

Organisations can find, engage, and reward co-creators who can help the organisation in short bursts. They don’t do the execution but do bring specific expertise, skill sets, and mindsets to the organisation.

There is a bunch of ‘stuff’ that needs to get done where a laser-like expertise of co-creators would help organisations. They bring accelerated learning into the organisation without you having to make the same mistakes. Co-creators can be used for many different use-cases, including but not limited to:

• helping to create the quick-wins to justify a full-time role
• diagnosing the real problem through experiments
• helping you to understand your strategy from the outside perspective of a customer

These co-creators can be customers, suppliers, users, potential investors, retirees. who have a deep expertise to help set the direction of the projects, experiments, programs, initiatives, RFPs, etc.

Now, the key barrier here is procurement. Most organisations’ procurement systems aren’t built to facilitate the hiring of co-creators. This is where the Head of Platforms’ job is to work with procurement to enable leveraging of people-as-a-platform to allow, facilitate, and incentivise outside expertise to engage with the organisation in lighter touch but strategic ways.

2) Problems

The default approach, be it from open innovation partnerships to accelerators, is for organisations (internally) to frame the challenges, problems, and opportunities, but then invite start-ups and others to solve them. But, we all know how organisations don’t always have the best pulse on the problems worth solving.

The OPI here is to open up departments, teams, and projects and create ‘passport’-style permissions for individuals (defined as search-ups) to come in and observe what problems are faced. The biggest thing start-up founders are looking for is access to the right people who are facing the problems they think are worth solving. Of course, these organisation ‘passports’ need to come with some conditions for confidentiality, time-length, etc., but their goal is to allow, facilitate, and incentivise search-ups to find problems the organisation is not solving but which are worth solving.

Another way of looking at it is that it’s taking the entrepreneur-in-residence programme, which typically contains one or two people, and scaling it to 100s of potential people. This is not a hackathon interface – where you’re inviting solutions – first, you’re inviting people to get an external perspective on the problems they see that are worth solving.

3) Products

This area of platforms needs less clarification. There is already great work being written about making the leap from products to platforms.

4) Purpose

Create missions under which others can own and attach their own narrative. UN’s sustainable development goals (SDGs) are missions, which invite organisations and individuals to build on top of. It takes a collective effort of hundreds and thousands of individual solutions. Similarly, individual organisations can create missions which others in their ecosystem, such as partners, suppliers, or beneficiaries can build on top of. For example, Pole Emploi, the French public employment services agency, is a successful example of turning its purpose into a platform. It launched the ‘L’Emploi Store’ which allowed others, such as online education provider, to provide than 1,000 online courses for the unemployed.

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In summary, the Head of Platforms job is to turn not just products, but also people, problems, and purpose of your organisation into platforms.

Before you go, if you think the concepts in this post or other posts, on new roles organisations would do well to create, is of any value, please share/comment/like so others may come across it. Thank you.