STRATEGIC AGILITY™
Elevating Organizations for High Adaptiveness
The Org Topology approach doesn't prescribe a direction. It simply allows scanning the landscape of organizational design choices and mapping the current status. We distinguish between three org topologies serving very different optimizing goals.
The #1 Resource-Centered and #2 Delivery-Centered org topologies dominate org design choices. They prefer isolated individuals with limited capabilities and teams with narrow ownership. They optimize for resource utilization and lead time in delivery. If that's what your organization needs, those are the topologies for which to aim.
But are they fit for purpose in product development? These two organizational topologies provoke the culture of excessive management and external coordination needed to ensure end-to-end customer value creation. Such organizational structures and operating models impede collaboration and limit human intelligence — by design. There are cases where this is desirable.
In product development, solving adaptive complex problems requires cross-functional and cross-component work and authority for the boundaryless application of existing and learnable skills. This allows organizations to discover and unlock untapped human potential.
The “Next-Level Wave” is the movement toward creating a #3 Customer-Centered org topology consisting of higher archetypes that learn and collaborate toward shared outcomes. The B2-C3 archetypes of the Org Topologies are gaining the best of both worlds by combining flow efficiency with outcome orientation. Often, this requires structural organizational change, followed by cultural adoption. This is Strategic Agility — a thoughtful org change aimed at elevating an organization to the top-right quadrant of the map. The target state is commonly known as Business Agility at Scale.
Our mission is to collect, crystallize, and share principles and guides on making this possible. Embrace the growing collection of Elevating Katas as the practical source of these ideas.
