Outcome Centricity: The next frontier for agile organizations (Part I)

Over the coming weeks, I will share and discuss my latest thinking on agile organizations. I've been working on this on and off over the last 1-2 years, as evidenced by the benchmarking study on customer outcomes, the lecture on value orientation within the context of agile transformation at the University of Marburg, and none the least through a diverse set of consulting projects related to the transformation of operating models, OKRs and the like.

Now I truly believe this could be a game changer for a lot of organizations, regardless of the industry they're in or their current level of agility and customer centricity. The feedback I've received during discussions with clients and collegues has been extremely encouraging.

So here's the core thesis in a nutshell: A lot of companies have invested massively over the last couple of years in order to become more agile, more customer-centric. They are on their way to become more flexible, more nimble, more efficient. They have learned to deliver and to build.

But they have forgotten that they're in the business of customer behavior change. They've forgotten that most of their efforts are in vain if they do not deliver against relevant customer outcomes.

That is, my thesis is that most organizations today are not yet relentlessly obsessing about outcomes that matter. I believe there's an opportunity to develop agile and customer-centric organizations further - toward what I call the outcome-centric or outcome-focused organization.

An outcome-centric organization is one which is designed around maximizing customer outcomes. Innovation, strategy, operations, you name it - these organizations are built from the ground up to deliver against relevant customer outcomes. They're characterized by a systematic drive to value.

As a teaser, you'll find some of the winning practices of outcome-centric organizations below. I'll get into more detail in the following posts.

Not all of these practices and concepts are radically new, of course. They are a mix of outcome-driven innovation, digital product management, agile governance & steering, customer centricity, the science of high performing teams, state of the art pricing and customer service practices and much more. To my knowledge, however, this is the first time that they all come together in one overarching concept: the outcome-centric organization.

In the next post I'll get into more detail as to the "nuts and bolts" of outcome-centric organizations. Specifically, I'll talk about the core beliefs behind outcome-centric organizations, how they differ from your regular organization and start to describe some of their key features. Stay tuned!

(Thanks to Raphael for the sparring and to Lisa for the great visualization. I'll also share a list of great references for further reading in the last post.)