Six steps to transform the way we do business
What do these businesses have in common?
A car company that can build cars 5x faster and 100x less the capital cost? Voted
in the top 10 most innovative car companies in the world.
A much loved global company that nearly went bankrupt but then transformed
itself to be more resilient with a halo of business models ensuring it stays in
profit and culturally relevant to its customers.
The largest diary farm in the UK, and the largest producer of organic produce in
America that have future proofed their businesses by becoming fully organic –
that are more profitable by needing to buy and use less fuel, machinery, made
man fertilizers, herbicides, pesticides and antibiotics.
Or a healthcare system that transformed how it worked, delivering greater value
in its frontline services and being able to create and agree on key policy
decisions in hours by believing in the power and potential of harnessing the
collective intelligence of its entire workforce.
In restating the question, what do these organisations have in common? The
answer is – they all represent the capacity to create and deliver lasting
transformational change by seeing their problem as a design challenge and
innovating. Innovating, production processes, business models, reinventing
leadership and organisational cultures to be more purpose driven. Becoming in
turn, more resilient, more economically, socially and environmentally
sustainable, more vibrant and creative.
As the world becomes more complex, there is an urgent need to transform
societies for a non-linear future. Our institutions, organisations and economies
were conceived, designed and built for a simpler more linear world.
Overwhelmed by a changing world, institutions, organisations and economies
have become disrupted and unsustainable. There is an urgent need to transform
our societies, organisations and economies by better design to thrive in what I
call a "non-linear world". A non-linear world has significant implications for
leadership, strategy, and innovation – the design of organisations and economic
models as a whole.
A non-linear world is one in which we embrace the power and potential of seeing
the world systemically. It is where we have the capacity and the tools (which
already exist) to radically redesign business. Companies can change their shape,
capability and performance of the organisation by rethinking and redesigning all
its core processes. This is whole systems design, pointing to a new industrial
ecology, not a series of boxes & silos. A non-linear world is a significant upgrade
to our linear one, proving that better, much better, does not necessarily have to
cost the Earth or our humanity.
In 1569 Geradus Mercator created what he called The Mercator Projection a
revolutionary nautical map – it enabled for the first time ships to navigate a
constant course. He described it “as a new and augmented description of the
earth corrected for the use of navigation”. I like the idea that augmented reality
was created in 1569. There are six framing principles as philosophy and practice
of how to design organisations and economic models for a non-linear world.
These six principles help us see what others don’t, to navigate and design better
outcomes.
The first principle – Ambiguity. When we face monumental change, when we
are being disrupted, organisations find it difficult to understand the true nature
of disruption. There is a saying that what happens in vagueness stays in
vagueness. This principle asks us to look at these disruptive forces systemically
to gain deeper insight so that one can see emergent possibilities of how one
might adapt. Too rarely do we step back to look at the hole spelt with a W.
YEO VALLEY FARMS is a masterclass in business transformation, of a company
that had been able to think and see their challenges systemically, then creating a
plan to address the Whole. Yeo Valley Farms challenge was simply one based
upon survival, how do we remove the acute volatility of running a farm on an oilbased economy? How can we become more resilient and attractive to our
customers to create a more sustainable commercial future? Owner of Yeo Valley
Tim Mead was prepared to look far down the road to explore the future of his
business. He was able to properly diagnose the underlying forces that were
consistently hurting Yeo Valley as a business by thinking systemically. Tim then
was able to take and make decisions where he could explore alternative
narratives for Yeo Valley Farm, an organic economy vs. oil based economy to
reduce costs and economic volatility, and scaling up Yeo Valley as a farm to be
able to stand toe to toe with supermarkets that dominate our food economies.
Short term thinking can leave you vulnerable: In contrast, Tim believes that
agricultural companies completely dependent on an oil-based economy are in
fact unsustainable, and vulnerable to climate change and a volatile global
economy. He believes that his overall operation although organic, which does
present its own unique challenges, is more enduring and economically viable.
Nothing is wasted. Nature wastes nothing – follow the design principles of nature
because she is highly effective. It is also a fine balancing act between now,
tomorrow and ten years time, but this constant headache means Yeo Valley
constantly invests in its future by investing in the whole ecosystem. It constantly
invests in the quality of its soil, its herd, its manufacturing capability and its
people. One simply cannot separate one from the other.
Yeo Valley teaches us that diagnostically we need to detect and identify
underlying patterns and hidden relationships to create meaning from that which
previously was perceived as chaotic, vague or even unseen. This is achieved by
looking at the world systemically, bringing that insight to bear on business and
organisational challenges. It enables us to move from a position of perceiving
potential alternatives of organising, creating, designing and building as risky and
unrealistic to recognising new common sense opportunities.
Case study: Yeo Valley Farms. Transitioning from an oil-based farming to
creating the largest organic diary farm in the UK.
http://www.no-straight-lines.com/blog/yeo-valley-farms-a-masterclass-inbusiness-transformation/
The second principle – Adaptiveness. Adaptiveness is having the capacity to
create what I call a new pattern language – a language that can describe entirely
new designs for business and its organizational capacity – the limits of our
language are the limits to our world. Adaptiveness is about moving beyond
traditional business language and tools to increase capacity for designing new
realities.
Yeo Valley owner Tim Mead has what he calls Plan A. “At Yeo Valley we have
what we call plan A,” he says. “The A stands for again—every time you turn
around a corner there is something new and you have to start all over again, so
the plan changes every day.”
We have to be prepared to continually upgrade ourselves, our business models,
ways of working – we can only do this if we learn to become agile. Adaptiveness
is based upon a continual process of creating, collaborating, communicating and
critiquing – it is a practice that evolves a new literacy of thinking and doing
because, if we cannot describe a new destination, we will never be able to get
there. Today, we have tools and technologies, software and hardware, computing
capability and organisational processes that mean we can now design for
adaptation.
Case Study: Local Motors http://www.no-straight-lines.com/blog/the-radicalre-design-of-business/
The 3rd principle – Openness. Nature thrives because her default setting is
open encouraging the rapid transfer of energy and information and in so doing is
regenerative and resilient. We have a great deal to learn from Natures design
principles. Openness is cultural – being open to new ideas. Openness is mutual –
in the sharing and redistribution of knowledge, information, data resources and
wealth. It is a process, and a tool that delivers to create entirely new businesses.
The concept of being open facilitates new organisational, social and commercial
capability. Playing a key role in helping participatory cultures to function
properly.
Yeo Valley works with openness in the purest sense of working intimately with
the full potential of nature. Consequently Yeo Valley uses no man-made nitrogen
fertilizers, pesticides, or herbicides; its need to use farm machinery intensively,
radically reduced. Yeo Valley Farms has significantly lower vet bills because it is
not pumping its animals with antibiotics and growth hormones and
consequently the cows are healthy yielding higher volumes of milk and they live
longer too. This pedigree diary herd produces a superior product, which Yeo
sells at a higher price point, and has developed a thriving business by working
with and respecting the diversity of nature, and its eco-system.
Openness as a principle and practice offers new capabilities through open
platforms; higher organisational performance, as open innovation accelerates
R&D and reduces costs; trading models; open source software, and legal
frameworks such as Creative Commons.
For example Air b’nb which is designed as a ‘global open platform’ is now valued
at $1bn. MIT makes available its entire curriculum for free framed by a Creative
Commons License, Elon Musk has made available all of Tesla’s patents on its
battery technology to accelerate innovation and investment in electric vehicles.
Case study: Competing to innovate in an open society
http://www.no-straight-lines.com/blog/competing-to-innovate-in-the-opensociety/
Case study: Openness the model for society
http://www.no-straight-lines.com/blog/openness-the-new-model-for-society/
The 4th principle – participatory cultures and tools. The human capacity to
collaborate is not quaintly folksy – it is in the fact the reason why we have, as
species progressed from the savannahs of Africa to build the civilisations and
economies we have today. Ignored by business and the management consultants,
collaborative endeavour is a powerful design tool.
Yeo Valley works very hard with its local community, Yeo Valley is a place, it has
community and Yeo Valley Farms is embedded in both. So people and place are
seen as critically important. Yeo Valley Farms also does a great deal of
educational work bringing children and adults onto its land to share its
knowledge ways of working and philosophy. Lastly it cooperative model of
organic milk collection and wholesale has proven to be highly effective in
enabling it to talk peer to peer with the large supermarket chains.
Participatory cultures as a leadership tool has transformed, for example, the
entire healthcare system in Nova Scotia. (Based on the insight that a best
possible future lies in the collective intelligence of the people that work in an
organization) – the challenge is how to release and harness that intelligence?
Massive multiplayer Games such as World of Warcraft, or online collaborative
games such as Minecraft – demonstrate the attraction of socially orientated
collaborative games – that can generate significant revenues. The US military are
pioneering learning programmes through participatory cultures. Look ay
Company Command http://companycommand.com
Local Motors even in the early stages of its development in 2009 collaborated
with 44,000 designers and 3,600 engineering innovators in one single year.
Today they claim an international community of enthusiasts, designers,
engineers, fabricators and experts. They have 81 employees and over 47.5k
community members, collaborating on 6.3k designs and 2.7k ideas across 43
projects.
LEGO has for many years worked highly effectively with collaborative cultures
for commercial benefit. The rise of the open software movement demonstrates
the power and robustness of collaborative cultures.
Case study: Systems change through people power. The transformation of the
Nova Scotia healthcare system
http://www.ssireview.org/blog/entry/system_change_through_people_power
Case study: Patients Know Best on BBC Radio 4 (13.07min)
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01mdl67
The 5th principle – Craftsmanship. To envision, create and build in a non-linear
world we call on the almost forgotten art of the craftsman. The craftsman
represents the trinity of creativity, the combination of the hand, the heart and
the mind. Craftsmanship is as relevant for the individual as it is for an
organisation enabling a deeper, more finely tuned approach to learning and the
craft of innovation. Providing an ethical framework and values based approach
to commercial and business practice, by asking – is what I create for the
collective good?
Today Yeo Valley Organic is a well-known, with many awards for product quality
and innovation, and a Queen's Award for Enterprise presented in 2001 for the
revolutionary way it worked with its farming suppliers, encouraging them to
turn organic and giving them long-term ‘fair trade’ contracts. The firm won
another Queen’s Award for Enterprise, for sustainable development, in 2006 for
its approach to management with continuing support for sustainable UK organic
farming thereby minimising environmental impact.
Other examples of Craftsmanship that have served companies well are LEGO
who have used it to evolve their business and business models; the practice of
Vertical or Urban Farming to create sustainable ways of growing edible produce
in urban environments; the innovation in medical technology with companies
pioneering data monitoring that will change the way we live our lives. The
cradle-to-cradle movement creating high performance regenerative businesses.
These are all in service to creating better for the collective good. There is an ever
increasing demand for such solutions.
The craftsman or the crafted organisation exists in permanent beta (a constant
creative process), the craftsman is always naturally curious, sees systems, builds
patterns and evolves literacy through a constant process of exploration of the
possible through the interplay between expression and technique. Tellingly, the
craftsman is joyful in sharing knowledge, and operates from a position of
confidence and self-belief.
Case study: How to create an innovative and sustainable company. The crafting
of Gransför Bruks
http://www.no-straight-lines.com/blog/how-to-create-an-innovative-andsustainable-company/
Case study: Codeacademy, raspberry pi, makielabs, lego, craftsmanship in the
21st Century
http://www.no-straight-lines.com/blog/codeacademy-raspberry-pi-makielabslego-craftsmanship-in-the-21st-century/
The 6th principle is EPIC – because the gamer seeks an epic win and so we must
seek uncompromising creative approaches to transformational change.
As we collectively face real, and significant challenges, we shouldn't adopt a state
that seeks incremental change within the existing paradigm, we must seek an
epic win – a term coined from gaming. The gamer seeks, or indeed quests for, an
epic win.
Yeo Valley Farm went from a small farm going out of business into a company
that delivers great healthy products, is profitable and contributes to the health
and wealth of the UK.
Epic requires the capacity to create and deliver lasting transformational change
by seeing the problem as a design challenge and then innovating for far better
sustainable and more humane outcomes. Yeo Valley demonstrates large scale
organic farming works, Local Motors can build cars five times faster at one
hundred times less the capital cost and have just produced their first 3D printed
car, open innovation platforms such as Top Coder demonstrate the capacity to
accelerate R&D for commercial benefit, creating better outcomes, mitigating risk
whilst sharing knowledge and wealth within a wider community. The
transformation of the Nova Scotia healthcare system through participatory
leadership demonstrates that engaged purpose-led organisations outperform
others, the philosophy and practice that we are all craftsmen and women points
to a very different way of being and working in our world that has many nuanced
implications as the Gransför Bruks case study shows alongside the digital
implications of craft with Code Academy, LEGO and Rapsberry Pi. All these work
at scale.
It is about recognising the opportunities for value creation and having the
courage and the conviction to blend new and old tools, processes and language
together to evolve, fresh, novel and meaningful strategies and operational
approaches. Which means striving for sustainable economic success, better
government, education and healthcare. It demands commitment to a vision and
the transformation of all the existing organisations, legal systems, economic or
otherwise, that currently frame and define our world to better serve us as
humanity.