Product-As-Strategy: Start-up superpowers for BigCo

Legacy organisations face two big problems as we stumble out of the great backlog clearance of 2020 and face up to new realities.

• They are trading on previous market-making innovations - and the market has moved on.
• They have lost the know-how to make new things at speed.

The solution is Product-As-Strategy: The application of product management discipline to solve for future needs.

Every multi-national business starts life as a start-up. Every start-up was ignited by the passionate desire to fix something that was wrong with the way things were or that could be done better. They all identified a problem that faced people and went about solving it.

By their nature they were product based. They started with the sketch of an idea. They tested that idea as cheaply as they could. They built a response to it, as fast and as inexpensively as they could. They learnt from what they did. They reshaped to align ever better to what they learned.

They had fun doing it. They were excited about creating something new that people would value. They made breakthrough products and new markets.

Sound familiar?

What I've just described is not only the spark that founds an empire, it's the rapid-iterative, insight-led and experience-centred approach applied by the most successful product, service and experience designers. It accelerates the product through Ideate-Concept-Prototype-Launch-Monitor. It applies Design Thinking, MVP (minimum viable product), Lean Start-up and Agile principles to focus on what can be learned to create value for the end user with each iteration, With appropriate insight is can only ever fail forwards (pivoting towards value) if that can be called failure.

Bringing back this way of working, re-establishing it and making it real again is one part of future-proofing today's legacy organisations. It's a very important part because an organisation - as far as its customers is concerned - IS its products.

Delivering smart product process requires a range of solutions to tackle inertias found in large organisations, for example:

Finance - product teams are best when cross functional - so who funds what, who gets rewarded for what. And when the product is 'never finished' how do you budget? Product-centred budgeting within broader product strategies offer some pointers.

HR - Hierarchies tend to flatten and roles merge. Product teams are more like start-up teams where everyone is doing a bit of everything. Low-code/no code solutions are opening tech to business people and business ideation techniques like Design Thinking are opening business to tech people. We need more fuzzy people and that takes a new approach to roles, fluid and MVP job descriptions.

There are others to tackle around the challenges of silos in large companies - the kind of silos that don't exist in start-ups, that must also be overcome. 

And they can be, and are, overcome by businesses organising themselves around product every day - with different forms of organisation drawing from agile and holacracy. Spotify is a famous example of the 'agile management' approach in which the organisation consists of Squads, Tribes and Guilds.

To get started fast, the product management process can be deployed in single strategic function; with a ring fenced budget and allocated team. This can act as Proof of Concept.

But to make this more than a fast and effective way to clear your backlog (ie solving problems you have identified from the needs identified in past contexts), we must add a way of seeing the future.

This is where my framework for the Responsive Organisation can deploy.

In brief; when impacted by a context shock, we should map the consequences (1st,2nd,3rd order...) in a systems map, identifying new contexts and using both insight and imagination (foresight) to determine new needs emerging from the human experience in those new and consequent consequences.

Naturally, these should be selected for vs an organisations own ambitions.

But in selecting to serve the needs of customers that are yet to emerge the organisation can start creating the future it intends and therefore can embrace.

This provides strategic prioritisation for the products it should make and as they iterate (with insight fed in to every step) the product shapes ever close to meeting real need as it emerges.

This combination of identifying future market-making needs to solve against, and establishing the capabilty to meet those through rapid and insight-rich product iteration means:

• The organisation re-establishes its market-making position
• The organisation builds the muscle to respond to need at speed

That is Product-As-Strategy. Start-up Superpowers for Large Companies.

Photo by AbsolutVision on Unsplash

How Responsive Organisations build the future they intend

My thanks to the community and organisers of Transcending The Crisis for allowing me the opportunity to discuss Responsive Organisation, Context Shocks and Responsive People.
30 Minutes I really enjoyed - and I hope you can find time to, too.

Thank you in particular to Mark Buchan and Si Alhir.

The future doesn't just happen. It is up to you

There is only one scenario in which the future happens to you - the one in which you take no action.

The future is, quite literally, what you make it. It isn't some weird place, separate from us and our decisions. It is entirely the result of our collective response - our actions taken - to the present and our anticipation of our own needs and those of others in the context of now and next.

By its nature the future contains anything that is possible. If it's possible, it can happen.

Some of those possibilities are beyond our control (The emergence of a pandemic is a good example - and even in these it is our response that allows us to control our experience of them).

However - most possible outcomes are the result of our responses. We are imagining and deciding the future we intend to live in.

I am not dismissing the structural frameworks that limit the choices of many people now. I am saying the collective choices we make now are deciding how those frameworks get to impact the lives of people in the future.

In the future, our needs will be the same. The context in which we experience them will vary.

It is in our understanding of those needs in the emerging contexts of the future that we are able to shape the future we intend.

We can allocate our resources to probe for them, make sense of them and serve them.

This is the promise of the Responsive Organisation: It is not simply to test and learn all possible futures - it is to provide the mindset and ways of working to create the future you can imagine and intend. That is, one:

• Informed by insight,
• Ignited by imagination
• Centred on the human experience
• Constrained by the resources and goals of the organisation.

If it's a future you intend to have a future, it should also be constrained by making a positive response to the needs of people and planet.

• Your North Star Amid The Ambiguity of the Next Two Years: Learn, Learn, Learn.
• How To Respond To Context Shocks
• Learned Personal Antifragility
• Being Change - The Responsive Organisation Needs Responsive People
• The New Better of Work - The best of distributed teams and office life
• People Audits - When your people aren't coping
• Urgent Digital Transformation
• Accelerated Trend to Automation

The North Star is clearer than ever - Learn, Learn, Learn

There is a clear new goal for every organisation - a North Star of brilliant clarity.

The obscuring clouds of the old normal have been blown away by the Context Shock of Covid19 and that has revealed a simple truth: In the Chaotic-to-Complexity reality of the next two years, as my good friend Rory Yates put it, organisations that learn the most will win.

The route ahead will emerge from the weak signals of the unknown unknowns - the very things that what you think you know, will blind you to. You can never be an expert in the new. The only way you can get a handle on chaos (or seek to understand complexity) is to find ways to learn from it. Dave Snowden's probe-sense-respond in Complexity or act-sense-respond in Chaos, for example.

As we learn we can reimagine our place in what we discover.

First apply some constraints - a framework in which to learn. The two essential constraints on a global scale are those defined by Doughnut Economics (follow that link for an interactive illustration) and activated in the UN's Sustainable Development Goals. The upper constraint is the planet's capability to support us and the lower constraint is minimum standards for humanity re rights, education, food, shelter etc. The space between (the ring of the Doughnut) is A Safe And Just Space For Humanity.

My own Planet Experience framework illustrates how this can be good for the planet, good for people and good for profit. In my view it is THE business superpower of the next 20 years.

Your North Star is therefore to learn as much as you can within the constraints of making a positive contribution to an economy which has, as its purpose, not growing GDP or y-o-y growth, but the creation of a Safe and Just Space for Humanity.

It's important in the conditions we face - of multiple unknowable outcomes - to acknowledge the decision makers role is now to be the steward of an ecological system rather than the operator of a machine. Decision makers must embark on that learning journey now.

There will be specific stocks and flows in the systems of your business which allow you to add energy or seek to dampen feedback loops towards unique and valuable contributions to the Safe And Just Space. 

Applying these become your guide to how you organise, the kpis that matter most to you, how you plan, how you set targets and how you describe success. Because it's not just the amount you can learn, but how able you are to respond at pace to what you learn - how you act on the insight - that really matters.

This focus on learning was always valuable and a core part of the CX-led businesses that now dominate the planet. Amazon is not only brilliant at gathering insight, it is designed to learn from that insight. It's a learning organisation first.

Today - in a period of Context Shock, it is even more important to become a Learning First organisation - to make Learning your north star. This is not a time to make plans like you used to make plans. This is not a time to set targets like you used to set targets. This is not a time to describe success like you used to describe success. That way leads backwards.

To be a learning organisation is to make your journey towards The Responsive Organisation; Always learning from change and acting on it with rapid iterative, insight-led ways of working, lesson-seeking, value-focused people and the organisational antifragility to handle the no-normal ambiguity of the world we find ourselves in.

Further Reading:

• How To Respond To Context Shocks
• Learned Personal Antifragility
• Being Change - The Responsive Organisation Needs Responsive People
• The New Better of Work - The best of distributed teams and office life
• People Audits - When your people aren't coping
• Urgent Digital Transformation
• Accelerated Trend to Automation

Being Change: A Responsive Organisation Needs Responsive People

Over the last series of posts I have illustrated the need to become, and the benefits of, The Responsive Organisation.
I have drilled into how to identify and how to respond to the Context Shocks from which a Responsive Organisation can benefit. I have provided a guide to developing and scaling its capability to benefit.

But, of course, a responsive organisation needs to be populated by Responsive People.
Indeed, from the lessons we learn from feedback loops, the responsiveness of the people who are the organisation will prove either dampener or accelerator to the responsiveness of the organisation.
I referred to the responsiveness in the individual as 'learned personal antifragility' in a previous post and recommended that those of us who had learned this, may hold some responsibility to share how, with others.

That is the intention of this post.

Engaging people in their personal journey of change is, in the reality of the complexity of organisations, entangled with the change of the organisation.

In the chaotic moments of Context Shock, of the kind we are experiencing through Covid19, the need to 'see what we do not see' is essential - and reliant upon the 'wisdom of crowds' that engaging everyone in the organisation can give you. Dave Snowden's Cynefin framework and its application to leadership through crisis provide ample evidence of the value of this.

A fine example of 'what we do not see' - and one shared by Dave - is this widely published image (below). 83% of radiologists miss the anomaly so don't feel bad if you do. Taken individually there's a very large chance it gets missed. But if you ask 100 radiologists it gets found (17 times being enough for you to take a closer look... at the Gorilla in the dark, top, right side of the lungs.

However, in the context of today's post I want to emphasise the purpose of 'asking the crowd' for its additional value in engaging people in change they can embrace.
Very simply the process for this is:
1. Identify and reach out to your crowd
2. Set the constraints of their observations
3. Capture their response as close to real-time as possible
4. Conduct your quantitative analysis
5. Spot the Gorilla and tell the crowd.

Now we have their attention (as well as useful emergence from weak signals to shape responses to the Context Shock).

The next step is to help them learn their personal antifragility. Your responsive organisation is reliant on people seeking learning experiences in change vs responding with fear. The more people you can take on the journey, the more you can amplify the positive benefits of the responsive organisation.

When Rory Yates and I reflected on what had given us some form of personal antifragility, the themes reflected in the slide above became clear (follow previous link for our validations).

With my 4-steps of Making Responsive People (above slide) I am seeking to replicate some of what we have learned from 20+ years in digital innovation and change.

1. Play: If you aren't a gamer and never have been, you missed out on some foundational stuff. We learned trial and error in a very 'safe to fail' environment. Let's close that gap in your psychological armour.
2. Feedback Loops: Properties on the web were so much more instantly measurable than anything that had come before. We learned to try stuff and saw, very quickly, what happened as and when we did. We saw rewards fast and that improved our responsiveness. So find what measures directly what you do, and measures it fast. Then, crucially, we must encourage and reward you to respond to what happens.
3. Positive Psychology: Recognise that most people fear change. They don't seek learning opportunities. They see threat in movement. It's natural. But it can be overcome. Programs which help people identify their 'Fixed Mindset' blindspots (see Carol Dweck's Mindset) can and do help us to change our approach to change. Building happiness through low-effort, high impact activities such as Yale University's (free and online) Science of Wellbeing Course gives us the tools of positive psychology to help.
4. Learn Through Doing: This is the essence of Being Change. But simply thrusting people at anything, from back to normal, to new normal, to no normal, without making them change ready, is a recipe for fear, unhappiness and dampened organisational responsiveness. You may identify some teams are ready to go straight to this step. Game-on for them . But they are in the minority. So for the rest, ensure steps 1-3 are conducted, then start your newly responsive-ready people on small, relatively low risk, test-and-learn projects with very small teams (5 works well).

Applied at scale you have tools to make your people, and with them the organisation, much more responsive.

Is furlough a glimpse of a bot-powered economy?

The Context Shock of Covid-19 is forcing underlying trends to the surface at unprecedented rates. We aren't experiencing anything that wasn't going to happen anyway - we are experiencing it faster.

Political economist Orit Gal points out: "complexity theory teaches us that major events are the manifestation of maturing and converging underlying trends: they reflect change that has already occurred within the system."

This means going 'back to normal' is a mistake. As is failing to become more responsive.

I have detailed two of these trends in distributed working, and the responsive organisation (and it can be argued distributed working is nested in and part of the trend towards the responsive organisation).

I have also documented the trend towards treating our planet as a partner, in the way we have become good at treating our customers with respect - in the concept of Planet Experience.

There are, naturally, others. The trend towards a cashless society, for example, away from traditional education (by subject and as a mass production model), for another.

I want to raise some questions about the acceleration of a significant and immediate additional trend today, because its second and third order consequences will have extreme impact on our economic model: Automation. 

As companies survey the challenges facing them over the next 12-18 months they will seek to cut costs both by scaling back on their office needs (distributed working) but also by automating everything they can. If any aspect of your job can be automated and the business you are working for is looking to survive, what it will spend on, is in ways of saving money. And it's undeniable that bots usually look like a short term win in this respect.

We can argue about the harm caused by the loss of smarts from carving people out of a business. The brighter organisations will use bots to lift and shift the bits of people's working lives that don't require creativity and imagination - so that that the people are free to create value by being more creative and imaginative. But that's looking on the bright side.

We are in a darkened world of raised drawbridges, of panic and protectionism. Fear will drive many, many struggling businesses to simply take the savings and worry about the consequences later.

Those consequences will include large scale unemployment. And for many people, pivoting to being an RPA expert (for example) will, realistically, be out of reach.

What this leads us to is the acceleration of a further underlying trend - perhaps towards some version of the Universal Basic Income. Covid-19 has given us an accelerated glimpse of that future through schemes such as the UK Government's Furlough policy. Touted as a job retention scheme on the assumption things get better again fast, coupled with the lock-down experience, it may prove a leading indicator of life after large scale automation. A taste of things to come.

There is nothing intrinsically wrong with bots taking peoples jobs. The challenges are in how we judge what constitutes a positive contribution to the society we live in and the ecosystem on which we rely.

If you enjoy time in the sun, exercising, learning, baking, creating art, music, craft, and in time, spending time with friends and family - doing the things you 'enjoy' more of the time than the things that are recognised as making an economic contribution (ie working), then perhaps we should formally value the enjoyable stuff as highly as we do the 'economically valuable' stuff.

But how? How do we get paid if the bots are doing our jobs? 

Stephen Hawkins last message on the web gave us a clue. He said the problem wasn't the bots, it was capitalism - at least the form of market-first capitalism dominant today. Bots are bad if they mean the economic value they create /displace comes back to fewer and fewer owners of this new means of production. Bots are fine if the value they create is more equally distributed to the benefit of both society and planet.

Taxing bots has been suggested to tackle this in the short term, with the tax raised being available to spend on positive interventions for society. Which could include a Universal Basic Income and investment in a happier, healthier society and planet.

This trend demands something important of us - our understanding of our own value, and of what we call success. We will need to start prioritising happiness over stores of wealth.

Is that all bad?



Photo by Robert Collins on Unsplash

How to Respond to Context Shocks: Mapping the Consequences

Recognising and responding to Context Shocks is a keystone for the Responsive Organisation.
The lessons taught by response to one, lays the groundwork for preparing for many.

In my recent series of articles and blogposts I have outlined:

• What Context Shocks are (a significant change in the context in which your customers/end users/employees experience their lives). 
• How To Recognise Them: (Two from: Timeframe; Location; Culture; Events).
• How to Respond to Them: (Map The 1st/2nd/3rd Order Consequences; Identify the New Needs; Iterate to value products vs those needs).

I have also outlined how the organisation can benefit from Context Shocks - by making no assumptions about a normal, old or new, they should struggle to return to - instead moving towards the emerging needs of its customers ( a world of No Normal).

Today I want to add a next step in the journey to becoming more responsive - providing the next level of detail in the 'How' of this journey.

MAPPING CONSEQUENCES

Mapping Consequences is the way in which we map the 1st/2nd/3rd order consequences.

I'm suggesting taking a systems approach - an ecosystem of the possible outcomes and their impact, one on another, drawing from systems thinking found in studying the ecosystems of the natural environment.

So building on the first slide shown above (and detailed in 10 Things I've Learned in 20 Years of Digital And Change): (please do click the image to enlarge).

In the slide immediately above, note the emphasis on weak signals - for example an increase in google searches for something related (in this case). 

It is equally important to emphasise that each consequence is itself a new experience context (from 2nd onwards).

We literally draw lines into the future based on our expectations of how human need will change within the new set of constraints each new consequence defines. Examples: If offices close, can we, in this new context, imagine a human need to go to the same streets we used to work in to buy sandwiches? Can we imagine homes replacing offices as offices replaced factories?

The connectors - shown above - of the Mapping Consequences ecosystem above - express consequence, the next bubble they connect to, an imagined new context.

And as in any system, expect feedback loops to apply; eg longer lock-down, greater impact on consquences (with impact on constraints) which impact wellbeing. 

This approach not only steers the Responsive Organisation toward meeting new need, it also emphasises respect for insights drawn from in-context experience.

To look ahead for the direction of consequences and the potential new contexts, we must apply imagination. We can look to the weak signals shared by others in the system to guide our imagination but we must always validate the conclusions we draw by accessing the imagination of larger numbers of people experiencing the system.

Further Reading:

1. The Responsive Organisation is Built To Flourish Amid Context Shocks

2. Lock-Down creates the fastest shifts in context we have ever seen.

3. The Greatest Opportunity of our life times - To Create A New Better

4. Lessons in Resilience Any Time-Served Motorcyclist Can Teach.

5. The New Better of Work: Virtualising the best of office and home.

6. The Language of Lock-Down Is Holding Us Back

7. The Future of Work is Distributed across Time, Space & Leadership

8. Urgent Transformation? Dump The Strategy and Get On With It

9. Urgency Makes Everyone An Innovator - And Changes the Organisation

10. In Stressed Environments Speed of Adaption is Key Survival Indicator