Designing the New Enterprise: Issues and Strategies

I’m looking forward to traveling to Paris, France the week after next to provide the opening keynote to the Intersection Conference. Intersection is an intriguing new multi-disciplinary event organized by Milan Guenther that’s intended to explore how we should design our organizations for the future. Milan also wrote a terrific book by the same name, which I urge you to read as well. The write-up for the conference itself says it best:

The role of design in economy and society is shifting. We see disciplines such as Service and Interaction Design moving beyond individual services and their digital components, to tackle experiences between enterprises and their audiences.

Enterprises and entrepreneurship are everywhere, playing a vital role in our lives. They are ubiquitous in the mass of organisations of all sizes we are in touch with as consumers, employees, investors, or in other roles.

This event is about designing the new enterprise, making it less awkward and more humane. We will explore how to design enterprise-wide brand experiences, social organisations, and digital businesses. To do this, design practitioners, consultants and architects combine methods and models from Service and Experience Design, Information and Enterprise Architecture, Systems and Design Thinking, to drive innovation and transform complex enterprise ecosystems.

Those who’ve followed my most recent musings on how our organizations are trying to change to adapt to a rapidly transforming world, and being changed even more by external forces outside their control know this has been a prime focus of mine. Technology in particular is the author of so much of what is reshaping markets, communities, corporations, and even our cultures. The growing question is whether our organizations will break under the loads of so much change, or are there paths we can navigate and steps we can take to transition more gracefully?

Additional Reading: What is the Future of Work?

It’s very clear that most companies feel an imperative to update how they operate to match the current state of the marketplace. But as I pointed out in ZDNet recently, the data shows that the average lifespan of the enterprise continues to drop steadily, due to poor adaptation to the latest marketplace conditions.

In addition, to make matters worse, due to misalignment between our constituents’ respective goals, we also see that most workers in the typical enterprise are generally are poorly engaged. Only 40% of workers are ‘well-engaged’ according to recent analyses. This is a unacceptable state of affairs, but we’ve really only ourselves to blame. I believe we can do better.

How do we adapt sustainably to constant change?

The big question is there an intersection between change, the role and function of businesses, and the future of work that will allow us to adapt more readily? Can we still do this while creating an environment that enables far better and more satisfying work and outcomes for everyone, including employees, customers, and yes, even shareholders? What skills must be brought to bear to realize a fundamental restructuring — in the face of the many major new modes of work — for how we absorb, adopt, and manage the external march of change facing us — and therefore frequently imposing serious business challenges — that we are encountering at an ever accelerating pace?

Personally, I believe getting to equilibrium between our organizations and external change will require a specific set of modifications to the core of most of our organizations. First, achieving this will require a much-more pragmatic and decentralized view of business and enterprise architecture. It will also require that we honestly look at technology and how we metabolize and assimilate it into the way we work and then seek ways to reconcile with it. We’ll also need to cultivate workers that have effective skills in design thinking, which they can use within and across the organization to locally redesign it for current realities. And finally, we need to update how we collaborate in a fundamental and more focused way, and by that, I mean all modes of collaboration between all stakeholders.

These then are the issues I’d like to explore in Paris in just over a week. I hope you will join me. Milan has assembled an all-star cast for this discussion, including corporate strategist, author, and futurist Chris Potts, branding, innovation, and design expert Erik Roscam Abbing, and the lead designer for Dassault, Anne Asensio, to name just a few of the leading thinkers who will be speaking and collaborating there. Either way, I encourage you to join this vital conversation.

You can view the deck for my keynote talk at Intersection 2014 here.

For more background, you can also view my Slideshare profile with sampling of my latest keynote decks on this topic.

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