Some Notes On Reinventing Your Business

Here are some “old” notes that come a cross a bit like a buzzword soup, but I’m pretty sure there are some germs of good ideas in here. If you can avoid going cross-eyed and dizzy reading the notes (or just scroll right past them), I follow them up with some bullet points that extract what might be those ideas to extract and expand on.

The Notes

There are two necessary paths to move towards an Aspirational Future State: Improvement and Innovation. Improvements can be made “in place” within the current organization sociotechnical system and structure. Innovations need to be made “on the side” because the current organization either cannot support them at all, would impose too much overhead, or would lose focus on its present goals. Improvement alone will never get you to your Aspirational Future State. Innovation alone will leave your current organization behind, with no way to reintegrate, and expose you to the risk of having it reassert itself in an uncontrolled and disruptive manner.

Making progress towards your Aspirational Future State requires both Improvement and Innovation. In both cases progress is made by connecting efforts to increase Delivery Performance outcomes to the business and customer outcomes that define Organizational Performance. Improvement efforts drive change in the current org and tech context, while Innovation efforts experiment outside the current context to deliver value that is impossible to realize within it. Together they form a Living Roadmap that transforms the org and tech context while delivering business and customer value on the way.

My Old Self

Potential Germs

• Reinventing an existing organization requires both improvement and innovation
  • (see also my blog with Basia Coulter on Globant’s Stay Relevant Blog)
• Here’s a word you probably haven’t read before, sociotechnical, but while strange, there are a number of ideas around it that are worth exploring further
  • From Wikipedia: “Sociotechnical refers to the interrelatedness of social and technical aspects of an organization or the society as a whole.”
• The key point here is that modern businesses should think about their internal “process and technology” or their customers “experience and interfaces” but about it all together as part of a single system
• Similarly, getting back to innovation and improvement, you can’t just do one or the other, you need both and they need to be managed together as an interrelated system
• Many client executives liked the idea of a “living roadmap”, and I always did too … but even after all these years, that idea still needs more work so that practical implementation is more straightforward and evaluatable