The Promises of Unbundling // Exploring Connections with SAFe // AI and Non-Scalable Human Experiences
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.
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It's good to be in touch again after another fortnight?of action research with customers and partners and to be able to share our learnings based on real-world experiences. As always we'll integrate these updates into frameworks as we go but if you're curious - or you're playing on the same fields and with the same challenges - don't hesitate to reach out to compare notes.
While recapping the?Key promises of?Organizational Unbundling?last week we realized that - despite it can sound?complex - such a practice allows organizations to achieve two of the most important outcomes they seek:
These achievements come along with challenges tough. One of the key challenges we encountered as we go ahead helping organizations unbundle to become more ecosystemic and entrepreneurial is?how to frame the creation of coherent product portfolios without resulting in?too limiting or too bureaucratic processes.
Thinking about the portfolio is a crucial area of focus for unbundled organizations: first, because it paves the way for intelligent "rebundling" (i.e. bundling?together distinct elements of an offering to create a compelling set of services for customers). Secondly, because the market is making it easier to develop new productized services: lower cost of coordination, and more power in the hands of teams (think the leverage that AI gives to teams today) nudges organizations to multiply their value propositions and thus in portfolios, not single products.
We're now in the midst of researching this challenge, dissecting practices, and investigating the convergence of organizational unbundling with existing approaches to portfolio management and - more generally - to product development operationalization. A good example is?SAFe's Lean Portfolio Management?competency,?or Domain-Driven-Design approach to identifying bounded contexts, and more.
AI and Non-Scalable Human Experiences?
To add dimension to this discussion, we're turning to Scott Belsky's intriguing piece?"The Personalization Wave: A Surge in Non-Scalable Work" (one of the pieces we curated in the latest issue of the newsletter)
Belsky, a true legend of product design and management, probes the impact of AI on products, suggesting a future where we're moving towards?increasingly human-centric and non-scalable experiences.
Belsky's future is one where AI automates the majority of tasks, freeing us to focus our energies on creating the key 20% of the value in experiences -?the part that makes them uniquely human. In the piece, Belsky offers insights on the three key defensibility mechanisms in this new product/experience landscape mentioning:
All three align remarkably well with our ongoing work on unbundling.
By allowing for the development of a plethora of niche products and empowering teams to develop them, organizational unbundling makes it easier to achieve the level of customer connection and intimacy needed to deliver differentiating advantages in an AI-mediated economy.
By having a?deliberate modular portfolio?and taxonomy, we can easily create incremental product bundles to which we can expose our customers over time, delivering adjacent products that evolve in sync with the user’s changing needs.
At the same time, such niche products can develop unique datasets that are hard to commoditize:?in a few words, to empower your teams to compete in an AI-based market that requires deep customer connection, you may have to necessarily unbundle them.
Belsky's piece also emphasizes the importance of 'smallness' and the?avoidance of scale:
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The concept of smallness and “enough-ness"?resonates?very well with our 3EO model for unbundling. This model indeed encourages the development of micro-entrepreneurial units driven by the employee-entrepreneur, where objectives and purpose are not (at least not entirely) imposed from above, but rather negotiated through the entrepreneur-employee will and passion.
This?shift in power dynamics?fosters a culture of autonomy, accountability, and innovation, placing employees at the helm of defining expectations and driving development choices.
Summing it up, we can say that organizational unbundling can provide your organization with the capacity to move nearer to the user and customize and personalize the offering.
This would be unsustainable for bureaucratic organizations that want to tell everyone what to do, from the top. Instead, small, independent units can stay nimble enough for enough time. In the long term, an organization that grows in "number of units" versus the "size of the units" fits much better with the new lines of value creation: personalization, intimacy, smallness, and thoughtfulness.
Enjoy Our latest article:
The Key Promises of Organizational Unbundling: Embracing Market-Based Organizational Models in the Product-Centric Era
What if every unit in your organization functioned autonomously? Embrace organizational unbundling and tap into the heart of innovation, resilience, and talent engagement.
Key Points we cover:?
The best option to familiarize with the potential of organizational unbundling is attending our 8th 3EO/Rendanheyi Masterclass coming up in September
Work with us
Boundaryless provides on-demand consulting services with an iterative and outcome-based approach. We iterate fast and produce results quickly. We work with organizations of all kinds, from Fortune 500 to small startups, and even the UN!?
For?startup or project teams, we help with:
For?larger companies?that are a bit more mature, we also work on:
Are you facing these and other challenges? Let's discuss how we can help:?