Adaptive Organizations
May 13, 2010 by marc
This post is a little summary of my reading of Stephan H. Haeckel’s book, Adaptive Enterprise.
In adaptive enterprises, strategy emerges from sensing and responding to customers’ requests and needs. The competitive winners will both sense and respond faster than competitors. Slower paced organizations (or parts of large organizations) in stable environments can still rely on annual strategy sessions with strategic plans and hierarchical deployment of those plans.
The key to leading adaptive, highly responsive organizations is clarity–with no ambiguity–about a few things: the context in which the organization exists, the outcomes the organizations is committed to, the accountable roles for those outcomes, and a protocol for “snapping” the modular capabilities together to create newly requested results faster than anyone else can.
Context setting is the number one role of leadership. Answering these three questions: 1) what is the reason the organization exists, 2) what are the governing rules (the key “musts” and “must nots”), and 3) what is the high level business design. The business design is different because it’s purpose is different–it must be responsive and it must be scanning and sensing customer needs all the time.
The high level business design of an adaptive, highly responsive organization has a few components: 1) a dispatcher role, 2) clearly defined capability roles, 3) clearly defined protocol for coordinating interactions among capability roles.
Perhaps the key distinction that would signal whether the organization (or part of a large organization) was a make and sell org structure or a sense and respond structure would be the role assigned to interface with the customer. If their main role is a sales force to make offers and sell current “in stock” services then it is a make and sell organization. If the interface role is a dispatcher who is empowered to make commitments to customers based upon the customers request AND is empowered to negotiate with the organization’s capability roles then you may be looking at a sense and respond organization. Selling what you offer vs. listening and responding to customer requests is the main difference. Of course hybrids will be the norm, but clarity about the differences is essential so you can actually be responsive AND so you don’t waste time and money when all you need to do is sell what you have planned and placed in stock.
