This past November was exactly 150 years since Charles Darwin’s “On the Origin of Species” was first published. While his treatise is most often seen in terms of survival of various plant and animal species, its principles can be understood equally as well with reference to our business organizations, especially in times when change comes at us like a comet. How adaptable an enterprise can be when change is happening faster than its people can learn and adapt may well be the key to its survival.
Writing about the limits of evolutionary potential, Olivia Judson hit the issue square on. While she was talking about survival in Nature, think about what she says in terms of our business organizations:
Whether a population can evolve to cope with new circumstances depends on how much underlying genetic variation there is: do any individuals in the population have the genes to cope, even barely, with the new environment, or not? If not, everybody dies, and it’s game over. If yes, evolution may come to the rescue, improving, as time goes by, the ability of individuals to cope in the new environment. What determines the extent of the underlying genetic variation? Factors such as how big the population is (bigger populations usually contain more genetic variation) and how often mutations occur. (“An Evolve-by Date,” The New York Times, Nov 24, 2009)
What is the take-away when we think about that in terms of our organizations, where “genetic variation” may be thought of in terms of a company’s pool not of genes, but of intellectual capital, a field of unrealized potential capabilities?
Collectively this can represent a vast range of strategic options in the face of business climate change. But the trick is to capture that potential, to target it strategically, and to activate it in time to turn the corner. Increasing the challenge, most often it is the combination of several capabilities that creates success, and that combination changes with each situation and for each person, each team, each project, and each business unit.
What is needed is a way to locate and capture those strategic capabilities within the firm’s resources—its people, methods, and tools—and share them as needed in real time. New capability cannot be developed on the spot every time it is required. There simply isn’t time.
To achieve this goal, what is required is a new way of thinking about what we mean by capability. It must be thought of as the organizational equivalent of the genetic population of a species--a global resource to be shared throughout the enterprise. Such a new perspective is what has given rise to what we call the eWorking platform. With eWorking, capability is not something that someone has; rather, it is something that one uses—the result of a creative interface of an individual’s experience and knowledge added to the collective experience and knowledge of the organization. eWorking helps professionals move beyond what they know to what is known, transforming what they can do to what can be done. The eWorking solution puts the expertise and resource base of the entire enterprise at the fingertips of the user in a focused and time-sensitive way, just enough to fill the individual’s current gap at the moment of need.
To be truly effective in the rapidly changing marketplace, a solution must be not only adaptive, but also fluid enough to respond in real time to the increasing waves of change. Our organizations must not only evolve, they must evolve quickly. eWorking platforms not only capture best practice and experience of the front-line people who apply the methods, they simultaneously drive the evolution of business methods and iterate those methods in real time. As a result, management can rapidly improve or change business methods to adapt to actual patterns of use or unpredictable circumstances. The tools, methods and data can be instantly updated with improved methods and best practice.
As one example, recently a marketing professional from a global building materials company had just come onto a project. He had some of the needed expertise and knowledge, but was lacking the full picture and, due to unexpected internal changes, there was nobody to quickly bring him up to speed. However, the company had been using the eWorking platform which had identified and captured the previous project leader’s expertise. The capability the new project leader required had already been embedded in the tool he was using to create the required output. Even though his predecessor was no longer with the company, his predecessor’s capability remained. The new project leader was able to activate that capability and use it to his advantage. The company was able to selectively tap into its intellectual capital gene pool and provide the right bits at the right time.
The eWorking platform provides an ability to identify, capture and apply capability in a surgical way as it is required. And that begins to change the entire capabilities paradigm to respond to sudden change. As Eric Lamarre and Martin Pergler suggest in a recent McKinsey Quarterly, “unknown and unforeseeable risks will always be with us, and not even the best risk assessment approach can identify all of them.”
Unpredictable waves of change, including competitive challenges, economic fluctuations, and global and regional events, can wreak havoc with the best-designed methods and strategies. The ability to address unpredictable change in advance may be thought of as real-time change management: capturing and connecting a company’s internal intellectual capital with best practice and early event detection in the field. The system allows virtually instantaneous, iterative and increasingly targeted response to iteratively bracket and tighten the organization’s response to new events and circumstances with great accuracy in shorter cycles.
This “real-time change management” infrastructure works on the same principles as stabilizer systems on cruise ships. Since it is not possible to predict the speed and direction of each oncoming wave, the ships deploy a set of “wings” under the hull that are activated by a gyroscope. When the ship encounters an unexpected wave the stabilizer immediately responds by moving the underwater blades laterally and horizontally in the opposite direction, thereby neutralizing the impact of the wave and smoothing the motion.
The “eWorking” platform is capable of detecting unexpected waves of change and quickly responding to them in much the same way. The power of such a system is that it can immediately activate strategies—knowledge and tools—supporting a company’s front-line knowledge warriors. This higher level of adaptability represents a big departure from the stable, static knowledge and learning systems that we find in most organizations. Much of the intellectual capital of a company is locked up inside static systems that were built for stability. But as Lamarre and Pergler point out, “these days adaptability trumps stability.” Thomas Friedman takes it a step further, suggesting that economic stability will actually cause companies to fall farther behind, whereas rugged, adaptable entrepreneurs and the systems that support them will be empowered.
Recently I had the privilege of working with one of the world’s largest CPG companies in creating a responsive eWorking pilot, an eWorking platform that evolves itself by linking its knowledge resources to the people that use them in a two-way flow. The result is real-time iteration and almost instantaneous response to the front-line where the company’s marketing methods are being tested by changing conditions on a daily basis. The solution—platform, tool and content—was iterated three times in as many months, each time responding to user needs and refined understanding about its actual use. The result of this new platform was an estimated 21X ROI and a decision to deploy the solution globally.
It is not possible to predict every new and changing circumstance, but it is possible to respond to the unpredictable waves of change with an adaptable system that can turn on a dime. Such a solution provides a complimentary adjunct to the process of stretching corporate vision to see around the next corner, and a way of activating that vision, ratcheting up the speed of corporate evolution to match the pace of change. I think Darwin might like that.
