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The building blocks of a dynamic organization

I have written about many themes that touch the corporations of today in this blog over the years. Themes such as Lean, social business, dynamic capabilities, Lean Startup, intrinsic motivation, and service-dominant logic each have had their time in the spotlight.

With all these themes and theories, what is the big picture? I believe there is, in fact, quite a coherent picture that can be painted from all these themes, and that picture provides some much-needed answers on what a dynamic organization looks like and how to build one.

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Managing inherent uncertainty with Lean Startup and social business

We live in a world full of uncertainty. If there was no uncertainty, waterfall would be an infallible project management method and a well-written business plan would be the key to success for any startup.

So, given that uncertainty exists, we face the question what to do about it. The traditional answer has been to reduce uncertainty and thus make things manageable, and there are still many advances that can be achieved in that field.

However, the more uncomfortable question is what do we do about things that remain uncertain? What if some of this uncertainty is inherent, something we are never able to remove? In such cases, we need to build systems to manage this uncertainty, even harness it, instead of merely attempting to reduce it.

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Reaching for enterprise agility with a dual operating system

The world is changing at an ever increasing pace. This is the mantra that we are relentlessly exposed to, and there is a fair bit of data to back up that claim as well, so clearly there are some challenges for businesses that need to be met.

One of the latest attempts to address these challenges comes from John Kotter, famous for his 8-step process for leading change, who has adapted his change leadership process into a more agile version that he calls the “dual operating system” of the firm in his book Accelerate: Building Strategic Agility for a Faster-Moving World.

In this post, I will look into what the dual operating system is all about and how it compares to other paradigms that also attempt to meet the same challenges.

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Times change, can your company change with them?

The world is changing at an increasing pace. There is even some evidence pointing to that, such as the 2012 Innosight study that discovered that the lifespans of top companies have shrunk considerably over the years.

What has been most alarming for many managers is that plenty of companies have not been able to rebound after the Great Recession. With the Great Recession as a convenient cover story for years, it has been easy to miss that some companies are able to succeed regardless, and all poor performance does not result from the recession. Yet, companies can suffer from poor performance even if they have not become any worse. How is that possible?

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