Deployment Age #4: Regeneration.

The Regeneration, Organisational Prototypes

Hi there,

I hope you and your family are healthy and well.

This week, I expanded on last weekend’s newsletter extract and published After the Outbreak.

Thinking and writing about the medium-term effects of the coronavirus, I found myself in a bit of a pessimistic tailspin. Then I fell down a rabbit-hole of geopolitical risks and unravellings. I have an IKEA-brand Pandora’s box filled with those frightening articles. If that type of thing is your bag, give me a shout and I’ll send on some links.

Otherwise, I’ll keep this one brief and mildly positive.

The Regeneration

When we rebuild post-coronavirus there will be a lot at stake. Many of the systems we took (and if we’re honest, still take) for granted are collapsing or on the brink of collapse. Others underperformed. As a society, we bought seatbelts that only work in cars that don’t crash.

During the week my friend, Viktor Tabori, made a great point.

Entrepreneurship is going to be at a premium when all this is over.

A huge effort will be required to rebuild businesses, institutions and communities. In many cases we’ll need to rebuild them fast. 

Over the past 15 years, entrepreneurship has come to mean something quite narrow - starting a very specific type of technology business that scales rapidly. That narrow definition is about to re-expand. Expect ‘Entrepreneurship’ to again include, starting a local brick-and-mortar business. And expect those entrepreneurs to share in the limelight that was hogged by scalable startups.

Skills traditionally associated with entrepreneurship will also be in demand in corporations. Even established businesses will be required to bootstrap. To re-start and re-negotiate systems, and relationships that existed pre-crash. To address the changed reality. To operate on thinner budgets and with new regulation.

In the next 18 months, most of us will need to become entrepreneurs of some sort. It’ll be fun.

Organisational Prototypes.

The Regeneration will call for new ways of organising ourselves. Here is an extract from an article I’m putting together on organisational prototypes.

Organisations are technologies. They evolved to solve problems where humans must cooperate.

To survive, a business must find a way to sustainably make profit. The modern world being complex, means most businesses are multi-person organisations. Sustainable profit-making then is a coordination problem. It requires coordinating groups of people (and machines (and systems)) to produce, market, distribute and sell goods and services. 

The problem of profit-making is the pinnacle-problem that businesses must solve. But that problem sits on top of a pyramid of other problems; problems that must be solved if profit is to be made. There is a fractal nature to the problems an organisation must address; from the general to the highly specific, highly local. Like Pratchett’s turtles, it’s problems all the way down. 

Most of us deeply know that organisations are riddled with problems. Ricky Gervais knows this. Joseph Heller, Saramago, Camus, Le Carre and Orwell knew this.

We know this in our bones.

Organisations are a nightmare to navigate. They are even more terrible to manage. Management’s role is to make sure the profit-making machine is running and so to manage the pyramid of organisational problems stacked below. With lots of autonomous, emotional moving parts, this is not easy. To bastardise an entropy metaphor: there are many more organisational configurations that don’t work than those that do.

So how to find them.

Design Thinking has a suggestion - organisational prototypes. An organisational prototype takes the concepts of prototype design that are usually applied to products and services and applying those principles to the design of organisations. 

Org prototypes pose the question: how can we make meaningful change with few people and a small budget, learn from it, then later scale that across the organisation? 

The benefits of these prototypes are two-fold: quickly create momentum behind change, and evaluate that change without the existential risk of re-engineering the organisation wholesale.

Org prototypes are fast because they are small, and because they attract fewer political roadblocks. There is no air of permanence to a prototype. They are also constrained on the downside - if unsuccessful, damage is limited and disruption is kept to a minimal set of employees. If successful, the org prototype provides strong evidence for the change you are proposing. Proof-points on the road to bigger change. A catalyst for action at a larger scale. 

When we rebuild post-corona, or even as we navigate this remote-limbo, organisational prototypes are a tool to lean on.

To get started with an organisational prototype, download the Org Prototype Canvas here.

Once more, I’d be truly grateful for any feedback on this newsletter and would genuinely like to hear how you’re doing.

Stay safe,

Simon