NEWS & PERSPECTIVES
This page contains news, events, commentary and other items relevant to S&R capabilities, concepts, implementations, and people. It will occasionally include information regarding the status and use of this site.
Earlier NEWS entries have been archived in order to reduce the length of this page and make it easier to find a particular item. Use the Search bar from anywhere on the site to locate pages with content on a specific topic. Both Archived and Current NEWS pages will be included in the search.
News items from previous years can be viewed by clicking on the ARCHIVE link below.
A new page, created in June of 2010, contains selected Perspective entries dating from 2005 in the form of Posts. Viewers can subscribe to an RSS feed and be alerted to new updates when they occur. They can also interact by adding comments and asking questions.
September 8, 2010
“The Post-industrial Manager”
Marketing Management, a publication of the American Marketing Association, has published this article in its Fall, 2010 Edition. It is a response to Peter Drucker’s call for a new theory of business, and has been called a manifesto for Information Age leadership.
With permission from the publisher, the article is reproduced on this site, with embedded hot links to an expanded XEROX Vignette and a Sidebar summarizing the principles of Organizational System Design. It will also appear (later) on the website of the American Marketing Association.
September 2, 2010
Introduction to Adaptive Enterprise
Increasingly unpredictable and rapid change follows unavoidably from doing business in an Information Age. What could be more strategically important than coming to grips with the implications?
The message of Adaptive Enterprise is that large, complex organizations must and can adapt systematically–and successfully–to this kind of change. Systematic is a property of the sense-and-respond model described in this book. Success will be determined by leadership’s competence in making a particular set of choices within the model framework.
The only strategy that makes sense in the face of unpredictable change is a strategy to become adaptive. Speed-to-market, customer intimacy, operational excellence, and organizational agility, however important, are not adequate strategic objectives in and of themselves. They are attributes of the real objective: successful and systematic adaptation. Adaptation implies more than agility. It requires appropriate organizational response to change. And when change becomes unpredictable, it follows that the appropriate response will be equally so.
These are the opening paragraphs of the Introduction to Adaptive Enterprise, published in 1999. The Introduction in full is now available on the Essays and Images Page with permission from Harvard Business School Press. It is a succinct description of the rationale and content of the Sense & Respond managerial paradigm.
August 17, 2010
“Thinking Outside the Box” is Crazy
When we say “think outside the box” we really mean “think in a different box.” A boxless thinker is literally insane.
We make meaning when we associate perceptions with a context. According to sociologist Karl Weick, (see March 3,2010 post) three components are required for humans to make meaning: an object or event (either physical or mental), a framework ( a context, or “box”), and an association that links the object/event to a framework/box. If we choose the wrong box, the result is a wrong idea….such as when we take literally something meant to be funny, or when our brain applies the rules of perspective to create an optical illusion.
The same kind of wrong ideas result when we apply inadequate models to interpret sales, the economy, climate change, or the chances of filling an inside straight at the poker table.
Sometimes we fail to see any pattern at all because we don’t have access to an adequate framework. Until the Rosetta Stone was found and deciphered, ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics were essentially noise to archaeologists. The Rosetta Stone established an association between Egyptian hieroglyphs and ancient Greek, enabling the Frenchman Champollion to create a framework that allowed archaeologists to make meaning out of apparent noise.
Rapidly matching environmental signals to an appropriate framework is a Sense & Respond core competence, because it enables decisionmakers to know earlier than others the meaning of what is happening now.
August 4, 2010
Commitment Management
Rigor and authenticity are essential attributes of inter-role negotiations about outcomes and accountability. Here is a link to David Ing’s summary of the linguistic theory that provides the rigor of S&R’s Commitment Management Protocol.
July 13, 2010
Innovation
We innovate all the time: finding better ways to get to the airport, adding a new ingredient to a favorite sauce, writing a poem, explaining why we missed that deadline for the third time……
Innovation is a survival trait in unpredictable times. So natural is it to human nature it seems odd to find this trait, like adaptability, so difficult to realize organizationally. One reason is that for an innovation to have any effect there must be a customer who values that effect. Matching an innovation with a customer is both critical and unnecessarily difficult in today’s large organizations.
We are our own customers when it comes to finding a better way to the airport, but who is the customer for a new idea in a large company? Finding that customer inside a suboptimized hierarchy of silos is, to put it mildly, not easy. Local budgets and metrics typically leave little room for the additional time and energy it takes to evaluate, reengineer, redeploy and harvest an unplanned initiative. Even if the idea is acknowledged to be good by a high level manager, the outcome is too often a suggestion to talk to someone else with equally tight time and resource constraints.
Out of the box innovations created in one silo are adopted in other silos only if they happen to address, and come to the attention of, someone’s existing, acknowledged and pressing problem. But this kind of timing is fortuitous and too rare. Many innovators spend less time developing and validating an idea than they do trying and failing to find an internal customer for it.
What if the organization were not chronically siloed and suboptimized? What if it were in fact designed as a system of coupled customer and supplier roles—whose interactions are defined by negotiated agreements to produce specific customer benefits? Then innovators would systematically have a robust context within which to innovate…….a context provided by internal (or external) customer roles whose needs define the problems, including those that require new and creative solutions.
Then a customer-back orientation would permeate the organization and innovation would flourish.
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June 14, 2010
System Thinking vs Process Thinking: WHY (Synthesis) vs. HOW (Analysis)
Why questions are about purpose and effects. How questions are about process and actions.
System thinkers answer the question “Why” by first considering the external entities on which a particular event or object exerts an influence. Analytic thinkers answer “Why “by considering the actions of parts internal to the event or object.
To paraphrase John Polkinghorne’s analogy, an analytic thinker would answer the question, “why is that tea kettle whistling” with a process answer: “because the tea kettle is on a hot stove, causing energy to be transferred from the stove to the water molecules, making them move faster and faster until some of them escape through a narrow opening, thus creating sound waves audible to the human ear.” A system thinker would answer: “because I want tea.”
Analytic thinkers invariably answer Why questions with How answers.
April 13, 2010
Sense & Respond at NOAA
The largest S&R implementation to date is a multi-billion dollar systems integration project involving 3,000 people. The smallest is a seven person organizational design for responding to what the United States National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association calls “coastal mortality events.” These include the unpredictable and devastating occurrences of whales and dolphins beaching themselves.
A previously unpublished summary of a 2001 interview with Dr. John Ramsdell describing how he applied Sense & Respond principles to deal with such disasters in near-real time has been posted on the Essays page.
March 31, 2010
Organizational System Design FAQs
Designing an organization as a system is a “Next Practice” core competence of post-industrial managers. A series of Questions and Answers on this topic as been added to the Essays Page.
March 3, 2010
The Evolution of Managerial Control
In the early 20th century managers controlled procedures. Frederick Taylor’s colleague Frank Gilbreth created Time and Motion Study, a method of teaching workers the most efficient sequence of micro movements to accomplish their highly repetitive and largely physical tasks. Supervisors were charged with enforcing strict adherence to the prescribed sequences.
Gilbreth’s method was taught in Industrial Engineering undergraduate curricula as late as 1958, by which time the pace of change had increased to an extent that it no longer made economic sense to continue training and re-training workers at this level of detail. Over the next four decades, led by innovators such as Deming and Juran, the focus changed to statistical control of process design and execution — a more general description of the series of steps to be taken in transforming a specified set of inputs into a specified set of outputs. “Six sigma” processes are the latest twist in managerial control of processes, and where most businesses are presently focusing their attention. This, in spite of the fact that change has become so rapid and unpredictable for many firms that improvisation and ad hoc processes have become the de facto behavior norm. And in spite of the fact that the high premium currently placed on innovation implies and requires unpredictable behavior.
The control issue for post-industrial managers is: How can organizational leaders ensure that the improvisations of empowered individuals produce coherent behavior by the organization? What replaces tasks and processes as the focus of control?
The answer is to shift the focus of control from activity to results; from outputs to outcomes; from process design and management to system design and management; and from holding people accountable for their actions to holding people accountable for the consequences of their actions.
This Sense & Respond prescription is reflected in and supported by the writing of sociologist Karl Weick, whose Sensemaking in Organizations is a must-read for anyone interested in how humans make meaning out of what goes on in the world. Weick describes three orders of control: direct supervision, control of routines, and premise control, which is essentially the control of context. The appropriate level of control is a function of the degree and predictability of change. Here’s an excerpt:
People at the top often inadvertently make their task more difficult by their efforts to make it easier. When they impose first – and second – order controls on subordinates, they create interactively complex situations….that enlarge in unexpected dimensions with unintended consequences, in ways that defy comprehension.
February 9, 2010
Organizational Alignment
For most of us, evidence of a pervasive lack of organizational alignment in the companies we do business with is all too familiar. Who has not been in the highly frustrating situation of trying to coordinate the fragmented parts of their bank, insurance company, phone service provider, on-line retailer, software provider, hospital, appliance manufacturer, newspaper provider, electrical utility, ISP or on line pharmacy? Such negative experiences are the symptoms of organizational structures and managerial practices that discourage cooperation and foster sub-optimizing behavior.
The costs to the firms themselves can be enormous. The large account executives in one multinational company report spending more than 80 percent of their time on internal conflicts, trying to make their organization appear seamless to its customers. This company learned that organizational incoherency costs it $1 billion per year because of delayed, compromised and uncompetitive responses to client requests for bids. The root causes identified were lack of clarity about accountability for results, confusion about who has the authority to make what decisions, and internal battles over the allocation among units of revenue credit and costs.
There is an innovative solution to this problem for leaders willing to learn and master a new managerial competence: redesigning their organization as a system of roles and accountabilities focused on a well-defined purpose. This does not “solve” the alignment problem; it dissolves it, because alignment is an intrinsic property of all system designs.
January 4, 2010
Traffic on senseandrespond.com for 2009 increased to 604,839 hits and 53,636 unique visits. The number of hits was artificially inflated by an estimated 138,000 hits associated with the process of recreating the site. Adjusting for this results in estimated increases over 2008 of 52% (hits) and 80% (unique visits).
December 17, 2009
“The Healthcare System that Isn’t – But Could Be” has been added to the Essays page. It describes the severe problems that arise because healthcare in the US was never designed as a system, and what would be required to do so. The specific nature of healthcare problems, and of effective responses to them, will change dynamically and unpredictably. A system design of roles and accountabilities is the right approach to resolving healthcare issues adaptively and coherently on a national scale.
November 29, 2009
Why?
For a strategist, the most important question is WHY, not HOW.
WHY? is often much more difficult to answer because it requires thinking deeply about the purpose of an organization and its component roles. The answer to WHY is the existential justification — the Reason for Being — of any organization of any size.
There are always two parts to the answer: what are the outcomes that the organization is responsible for producing/effecting; and who is the customer for each of those outcomes. Without the first component there is nothing to ask HOW about. Without the second, there is no reliable source of validation that organizational purpose is being realized.
HOW is a process question. WHY is a system question. That’s why organizational leaders at all levels should master the principles of system design.
September 30, 2009
The September 22 entry has been revised based on feedback from thoughtful business and academic visitors to this site. It is still less than 500 words, and still emphasizes that the crucial distinction between Make & Sell and Sense & Respond organizations is managerial in nature, and lies in their respective purpose and success metric.
A particularly interesting insight came from an army general, pointing out that the military’s customers are…….the enemy. In fact, the military is much more attuned than most businesses to the distinction between effects and outputs — for example the distinction between dropping munitions on a target and disabling, deterring or destroying the opposing force. In this case the effects are negative rather than positive values in the eyes of the “customer.” Collaboration remains a requirement, but is usually achieved surreptitiously and by misdirection.
September 22, 2009 (Revised 9-30-09)
Managing Outputs, Effects and the Co-production of Value
When a tree falls in the forest, it makes no sound. It makes sound waves. Sound is produced in the auditory cortex of listeners when sound waves trigger vibrations in their ears. If there are no hearers, there is no sound. Similarly, grass is not green if no one is looking at it. Green is an effect created in the brain of a viewer in response to stimulation by light waves of a particular frequency. If there are no viewers, there is no color.
Sound waves and light waves are outputs. So are products and services. Sound and color are effects. So are customer benefits. If there are no customers, there are no beneficial effects and therefore no value. Users, consumers, patients, students, and audiences must actively participate in order for value to be produced. That is why value creation is necessarily a result of collaboration between producer and customer, and why structuring that collaboration is an essential competence of Sense & Respond organizations.
Both Make & Sell and Sense & Respond companies produce product and service outputs. The prototypical M&S company makes trees fall and has processes to ensure this is done efficiently for large numbers of sound-deprived customers (markets).They may be “market-driven” in the sense that they understand that sound is the underlying value—and feature that in their marketing messages — but they are organized around, and measure themselves on, the cutting and selling of falling trees. S&R companies might produce the very same outputs, but systematically incorporate them with the outputs required of customers and of other suppliers (perhaps makers of personalized hearing devices), to ensure that individual listeners hear the sound.
The transformative difference is not in outputs, but in organizational purpose—from outputs to effects. Implementing this change in purpose necessitates changes in the way a business is managed: its structure, metrics and business model. Trying to realize a new purpose with an old management system is not only frustrating, complicated and confusing, it is ultimately futile. That is why S&R is first and foremost a managerial innovation.
Sense & Respond companies enjoy a unique competitive advantage when they extend the scope of organizational design beyond their own borders. They then become the de facto architects of customer value by 1) identifying a defined customer effect as the organization’s purpose, and 2) creating a Role and Accountability design that specifies the interactions of customer, supplier and third party roles that will achieve that effect. Their value proposition is now much more than outputs and a marketing message; it incorporates the game-changing differentiator of an extended enterprise design for co-producing the benefits that their customers value…….thereby transforming sound wave companies into sound companies.
September 9, 2009
Senseandrespond.com has been completely re-created using an open source language. This should preclude future disruptions that occur because proprietary software is discontinued or becomes unsupported by the hosting company. The effort was laborious, and the patience of visitors to this site during this hiatus is greatly appreciated.
The look and feel of the site has been improved without sacrificing ease of use and navigation. Users should now experience the same formatting when using Explorer, Mozilla or Chrome browsers. The addition of a Search function is a significant enhancement.
July 29, 2009
Predictive Analytics, Knowing Earlier, and Sense & Respond
Introducing a new term that gains wide acceptance can be a mixed blessing. Sense and Respond (in a business context) was coined as a way of distinguishing adaptive enterprises from efficiency-centric “make-and-sell” enterprises. But the term has had enough intuitive appeal for usage to outrun understanding. This is true even in parts of IBM, where both the term and concept originated.
Sense and Respond is first and foremost a managerial paradigm for creating and leading organizations that systematically exhibit sense and respond behaviors . These behaviors are a spectrum running the gamut from the reactive (e.g. make to order), to the proactive (i.e. knowing earlier and responding preemptively).
Here are two excerpts about sense and respond behaviors. The first is from Chapter 1 of Adaptive Enterprise (p 10).
“Sense-and-respond does not always mean listen-and-comply….[it] can also mean anticipate and preempt…..”
The second is from a NY Times article on July 29, 2009 reporting IBM’s acquisition of a SW firm called SPSS:
I.B.M.’s general manager for information management, Ambuj Goyal, said in a statement that “predictive analytics can help clients move beyond the ‘sense and respond’ mode — which can leave blind spots for strategic information in today’s fast-paced environment — to ‘predict and act’ for improved business outcomes.”
In fact, Mr. Goyal is not referring to the sense and respond paradigm, but to a capability for sense-making that can enhance the adaptive performance of decision makers. “Predictive analytics” are one way of interpreting data—of sense-making. Other sense-making methods include pattern recognition, heuristics and intuition. [See especially the Nov. 1, 2007 entry below, as well as the entries for August 10, 2007, October 3, 2007, February 1, 2008 and April 14, 2008 for more on the S&R core competence of Knowing Earlier the meaning of what is happening now.]
There is a certain irony in using the term “predictive” to label tools that are created to address the problem of increasing unpredictability. As Michael Kusnic (co-author of the Appendix in Adaptive Enterprise on collaborative and adaptive decision-making) is fond of reminding us, “There are no data on the future.” The best we can do is try to make sense out of what is happening in the present, capture learnings from the past, sense when new variables, discontinuities and non-linear relationships invalidate the sense-making frameworks we are using, and adapt by changing those frameworks appropriately. In S&R language, this is called “Adapting the adaptive loop” (the Sense-Interpret-Decide-Act cycle).
Therefore, rather than moving an organization “beyond sense and respond,” stream computing and better real-time analytics actually move an organization further toward the proactive end of the sense and respond spectrum.
July 24, 2009
Commitment Management SW Available from CoThrive
Keeping track of commitments between people is an important capability for any organization. In Sense & Respond organizations it is a core competence for governing (but not dictating) the dynamically changing inter-role commitments to outcomes. This is because, unlike the vertical manager-subordinate performance evaluation structure of Make and Sell companies, the commitments that count “go sideways” in the Role and Accountability structures of Sense & Respond. (see Chapter 8 of Adaptive Enterprise, the Commitment Management Whitepaper download on the Library page, and an HBR article by Sull and Houlder ).
CoThrive announced commercial availability of its Commitment Management Software on May 31, 2009. It is web based, and features a parsing function that extracts information in standard email notes into formal Requests, Assignments and Agreements. Negotiations, renegotiations, status reports and linkages are tracked and analyzed. There is no software to install, and no need to learn a new language. A demo and trial period sign-up can be found at www.cothrive.com.
July 22, 2009
Adaptive Enterprise Available in a Library Near You
Adaptive Enterprise is available in 377 libraries. A list of them, ranked in order of proximity to your zipcode, is available on http://worldcat.org/oclc/40417611
June 9, 2009
Turf Battles
The extract below is from a January 2006 essay. It points out that turf battles between multiple sub-optimizing intelligence units are an unavoidable outcome of the 9-11 Commission’s organizational recommendations.
“So deeply ingrained and unchallenged are the principles of the legacy management system that most readers of the 9-11 Commission report …. would …. find unremarkable the Commission’s organizational recommendation ……[But] in terms of the issues to be addressed, it is truly remarkable – precisely because it is so traditional….so static. It deals with the accountability issue by adding yet another decision-making layer at the top. The sharing and coordination issues are not addressed at all ….. And even the most casual viewer can readily see the battle lines where future turf and budget wars will be waged.”
This outcome was reported as news in a June 8, 2009 NY Times article by Mark Mazzetti, “Turf Battles on Intelligence Pose Test for Spy Chiefs.”
“….almost since its inception the national intelligence director’s operations have been criticized as being bloated and ineffective. Last year, the inspector general at the national intelligence director’s office issued a withering report criticizing it as unable to end the turf battles that for years plagued the intelligence community and were partly responsible to the failure to prevent the Sept. 11 attacks.
Even more criticism comes from current and former C.I.A. officials, who often portray the intelligence chief’s office as an unnecessary bureaucracy that gums up machinery desperately in need of streamlining.”
The wondrous aspect of this outcome is not how predictable it was, but rather how deeply ingrained is the idea that an intelligence organization whose effectiveness is dependent on its ability to rapidly adapt to unanticipated events should continue to be designed as if it were a static bureaucracy. What will it take for those responsible to realize that highly adaptive people supported by the most advanced technologies available require an adaptable organizational design in order to fully exploit those skills and capabilities?
March 6, 2009
Adapting to Economic Turndowns
Adaptable organizations, like adaptable organisms, survive in lean times. Some may even flourish if their value propositions are well-attuned to enhancing the survivability of customers.
Because of their core competences and structural attributes, S&R organizations are much better positioned than traditional Make and Sell firms to weather deteriorating economic conditions:
- Investments in anticipating (knowing earlier) the changing needs of customers enable earlier identification of the need to modify the existing value proposition.
- The modularity intrinsic to Role and Accountability structures enables rapid re-design, re-alignment and re-deployment around a new value proposition.
- Technology-supported commitment management enables the rapid propagation and tracking of new global constraints and restraints (Governing Principles).
- The ease of incorporating third parties in Role and Accountability designs facilitates outsourcing, as opposed to ownership, of capabilities and assets. This in turn greatly enhances businesses’ ability to grow and shrink their level of investment as the level of “nutrients” in the environment change.
January 6, 2009
Traffic Report for 2008: 32,604 unique visits to www.senseandrespond.com generated 346,520 hits
November 26, 2008
Dealing With Complexity in Organizational Designs
Complexity is a function of the number of components in a system and the number of possible connections between components. As the number of elements increases, the number of potential interactions increases disproportionately faster. For example, there are three possible two-way links between three different medications: Med A with Med B; Med A with Med C; and Med B with Med C. But if you double the number of medications to six, the complexity increases five-fold to fifteen possible links. The more meds you take, the more difficult it becomes for physicians to predict the net effect on you of their interactions, a complexity issue of growing concern to drug companies, regulators, doctors and patients. (See NY Times, November 25, 2008 “New Arena for Testing of Drugs,” by Gina Kolata.)
Because of this arithmetic, when Intel increased the number of transistors on their new microprocessor chip from the 29 thousand of its predecessor to 730 million, the number of possible interconnections became larger than the number of atoms in the universe. It is impossible to test anything more than a miniscule subset of these interactions, which guarantees that combinations will occur that weren’t contemplated by the chip designers. Among them are combinations that stem from the software and devices you decide to put on your Intel-inside computer, and what you decide to do with them.
Similarly, the designers of an organization cannot predict most of the interactions that will take place in future development projects, mergers, or between two people sitting next to one another in the cafeteria or at a budget meeting. The vast majority of these interactions are irrelevant, but any one of them could be monumental in terms of its effect on organizational performance.
Unpredictability is a fundamental attribute of large complex systems — which is what climates, bee colonies, the human body, large scale microprocessors and sizeable human organizations are. But Intel chips and human organizations are special cases, because humans can specify their purpose and design them. The managerial competences required to design, create and lead complex adaptive organizations are described in Adaptive Enterprise. One of these competences leverages the same principle that Intel applied to get their arms around chip complexity: modular design.
Modular design mitigates the problems of complexity by “chunking up” interactions into modules, thereby reducing the number of linkages that must be specified, tested and tracked. Each module is composed of elements that interact to produce a higher level (synergetic) effect at the module level. And if these modules can be clustered into higher-level “super” modules that interact to produce an even higher level effect, things get much more manageable. Furthermore, if these super modules are then clustered into “super-super” modules….. The progression can continue indefinitely, with each successive clustering significantly reducing the number of elements and interactions to keep track of, because now the arithmetic is working for the designer.
Introducing modular design to an organization significantly enhances its ability to cope with complexity, and to adapt in the face of unpredictable change. In the Sense & Respond paradigm, organizational modules are called roles, and the interactions between roles are specified as exchanges of outcomes (effects) that are negotiated between people occupying those roles — people who are accountable to one another for the production and acceptance of the outcomes agreed to. The organizational design is appropriately called a Role and Accountability Design, and features multiple levels of interacting Role modules.
Modular design is one of the principles of a post-industrial managerial competence: designing organizations as systems. An introduction to these principles is provided here. Questions and answers on organizational design topics that are beyond the scope of an introductory article can be found here .
November 12, 2008
S&R as a Project Management Innovation
The largest S&R implementation to date ($8 billion and 3000 people) involved an outsourced integration project. In this and in smaller efforts, some executives are finding that project management is an effective way of introducing S&R innovations in traditional organizations.
Why? Because projects frequently address new problems that don’t fit neatly into the existing organization: they cut across the silos. Furthermore, successful project managers know the crucial importance of articulating project objectives in unambiguous terms, and of getting everyone on the same page. They focus on outcomes, and the better ones are tolerant of people doing things differently than they themselves would.
For these leaders, S&R is a formalization and extension of the “natural” way they manage. They are quick to recognize the value of designing the project as a system of roles and accountabilities — an innovation that ensures alignment, discourages suboptimized behaviors, clarifies the relationships between project roles, and enables coherent empowerment. [Commitment management protocols and tools, and organizing information into role-specific support for sensing and sensemaking are less frequently employed innovations, because they require behavioral changes and/or investments that take time and resources to put in place.]
It has changed the way at least one executive thinks about his company: “We are essentially a very large project office that continually reconfigures its capabilities into customer-specific responses.”
September 19, 2008
Adaptive Enterprise Chapters Now Available On Line
Harvard Business School Press has made the individual chapters of Adaptive Enterprise : Creating and Leading Sense-and-Respond Organizations available on line.
Go to http://chapters.hbsp.harvard.edu and scroll down to the “Competitive Strategy” section. The Adaptive Enterprise chapters are the first entry in this category.
September 2, 2008
What Does “Sense & Respond” Mean in the Department of Defense?
Two articles address what their authors believe to be a widespread misunderstanding in the DOD about “Sense and Respond.” In their view, the term has spread throughout the military much more rapidly than has an appreciation of what it means.
- One of these articles, by Marine Corps Major Mark Menotti, now appears on the first page of a “sense and respond” Google search. Menotti completed Sense and Respond education, and has conducted his own research on the applicability of S&R managerial principles to Marine Corps transformational challenges. He is particularly qualified to write on the subject. His overview of S&R is available at http://www.lionhrtpub.com/orms/orms-8-04/enterprise.html Here is his introduction:
What is an adaptive enterprise? What does it mean to be a “sense-and-respond” organization? These terms are becoming quite popular within the business community, and the terminology has also piqued the interest of many government agencies as well. However on several occasions, well-meaning individuals are incorrectly labeling ideas under these titles. This article will provide a condensed version of what it means to use these titles and explain why the U.S. Marine Corps should consider redesigning its current structure in order to become a “sense-and-respond” organization.
- “Sense and respond: an emerging DOD concept for national defense” is an article by Russel A Vacante in the February 1, 2007 edition of Defense A R Journal. It is now available from The Free Library at http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Sense+and+respond:+an+emerging+DoD+concept+for+national+defense.-a0167026978The article positions Sense and Respond Logistics in the larger context of the Sense and Respond managerial paradigm. The first paragraph sets forth the author’s objectives:
Sense and respond is a concept that is emerging from the context of the network-centric environment. The relative unfamiliarity of this concept within much of the defense community suggests that its meaning and necessity are not completely understood. To help make sense and respond less a catchphrase and more a well understood concept, the text that follows will address: what the term sense and respond means, why it is important to our national security, and its relationship and application to the logistics community. The goals of this article are to provide the reader with a fundamental understanding of the sense-and-respond concept and promote greater dialogue among a larger group of interested parties on this concept.
July 1, 2008
Extending Sense & Respond Logistics (S&RL) to Sense & Respond Combat Support
S&RL was a response by the DOD to the realization that “event-driven demand-pull” provisioning is inherently more effective (and ultimately more efficient) than “predict-plan-push” supply chains. A 2007 Rand Corporation Monograph by Robert S. Tripp proposed extending S&RL to incorporate additional Combat Support capabilities…..but still within the framework of a traditional (albeit technologically enhanced) Command and Control system.
The logical conclusion of this evolution is the incorporation of Logistics, Intelligence and Operations capabilities into a coherent and highly adaptable Sense & Respond Combat System. But the more inclusive the response capabilities, the more silos and sub-optimizing performance metrics are dragged in. As it stands, extraordinarily adaptive and effect-driven war fighters must still rely on efficiency-driven “back-office” systems.
An interesting question, therefore, is how far down the technology path a sub-optimizing military can go before the lack of a corresponding managerial transition from Command and Control to Context and Coordination becomes an insurmountable hurdle.
May 10, 2008
CEOs Focus on Coping with Change…….Again
Struggling with the information age challenges of unpredictable change has occupied senior managers for at least three decades. According to a new study by IBM this continues to be the case – only more so.
In its third global survey of over 1000 CEOs and public sector leaders, IBM discovered that the number of executives expecting substantial change has increased by 18 percent in the past two years (from 65% to 83% of those interviewed). Sixty-one percent stated that they had changed successfully in the past — which may sound high, but many executives (and companies) who have not successfully adapted were presumably no longer around to be interviewed. Market factors and access to competent people were said to be the two most significant factors affecting an organization’s ability to cope with the changes confronting it.
“Virtually all CEOs are changing their business models,” is a particularly interesting finding of this survey. It indicates that the battle ground of change management is itself changing. What was early on considered an imperative to produce adaptive product and services, and then adaptive strategies, is now becoming an issue of rapidly adapting thebusiness model. (See Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer’s assessment of how difficult this is in the Essay on Managerial Models).
Just as modular design became recognized as the best way to make products and services adaptable, so modular organizational design seems destined to become the way to make business models adaptive. This is why Role and Accountability Designs are central features of S&R organizations. Learning how to create and implement such designs will become a core managerial competence. (See Next Practices descriptions on the S&R Workshop page .)
April 30, 2008
U. S. Marine Corps Implementation of Sense & Respond Logistics (S&RL)
The Marines’ implementation of S&RL demonstrates how networks of organizational capabilities can be leveraged by role-specific OODA-loop support. (OODA: Observe-Orient-Decide-Act is the military acronym for SIDA:Sense-Interpret-Decide-Act). Real-time sensors and near-real time diagnostic software augment the ability of decision-makers to know-earlier and respond faster to what is currently happening (see the November 1, 2007 entry below). Linking these decision-making roles in a logistics network elevates an improvement in individual performances to an overall improvement in the effectiveness of the USMC logistics organization.
The success of such an implementation depends heavily on the quality of judgments made about which capabilities are subject to demands stable enough to warrant integrating them in advance as automated procedures and standard processes; and which must respond to unpredictable events. These latter must be dealt with by dynamic, instance-specific capability linkages that are orchestrated in near real time by the individuals occupying organizational roles.
The video clip at www.usmc-srl.com/MDM-2007.html describes how the marines use S&RL to respond rapidly and specifically to the maintenance needs of individual LAVs (Light Armored Vehicles).
Other recent entries on this page related to SIDA loop implementations: August 27, 2007, and February 1, February 6, March 17, and April 11, 2008.
April 14, 2008
Knowing Earlier with Metaphors
Marketing Metaphoria by Gerald and Lindsay Zaltman has just been published by Harvard Business School Press. Jerry Zaltman is an Emeritus Professor of Marketing at Harvard, and creator of a patented methodology for eliciting the deep metaphors that are common among people who encounter a particular company, product, service, experience or issue.
As the authors say in the Introduction, the method was developed, “because most of what people know, they do not know that they know – and what they say may not be what they mean—since most thoughts and other important cognitive processes occur unconsciously.” The Zaltmans provide dozens of examples of first-tier companies who have successfully leveraged this insight.
Though positioned as a marketing research innovation (and it is), their metaphor elicitation method has important implications and applications for customer-back business strategies and organizational designs. It is a tool for knowing earlier than customers what they think and feel…..a diagnostic for developing and validating differentiated value propositions, and for delivering preference-creating experiences.
March 17, 2008
Managing by Wire: The Original Article
“When pilots fly by wire, they’re flying informational representations of airplanes. In a similar way, managing by wire is the capacity to run a business by managing its informational representation. Manage-by-wire capability augments, instead of automating, a manager’s function. Fly-by-wire technology—and by extension managing by wire—integrate pilot and plane into a single coherent system. The role and accountabilities of the pilot become an essential part of the design. Autopilot, or complete automation, is used only in calm, stable flying conditions. The system design allows for considerable flexibility in pilot behavior, including the ability to override the technology if, for instance, a sudden storm arises.”
Almost fifteen years after it’s publication, the seminal “Managing by Wire” article is featured in a current Harvard Business Review advertisement. The excerpted passages in this ad provide an excellent summary of the article.
Although it preceded the publication of Adaptive Enterprise by six years, the concepts of sense-and-respond, adaptive Sense-Interpret-Decide-Act loops, roles and accountabilities, and coherence as an organizational imperative were already emerging. But if the article were written today, three modifications would be appropriate:
- A distinction would be drawn between “enterprise models” as informational representations of a business, and “role and accountability” (R&A) designs as expressions of policy-level executive intent. In 1993, enterprise models were the creations of IT professionals, who did their best to elicit executive intent through interviews and interpretations of policy and strategy documents and executive memos and speeches. In a very real sense, “enterprise models’” were largely figments of the IT imagination – used as a basis for formulating, designing and implementing IT strategies, infrastructures and systems.
- Because both enterprise models and R&A designs are system designs, an R&A design is the ideal starting point for an enterprise model design. Both are architectures, but while there are many IT architects, there are still very few business architects. Why? Because designing organizations as systems is a new managerial competence….one not yet covered in MBA curricula.
- The analog of an executive managing a business by wire like a pilot flies a plane by wire suggests 1) that human social systems are amenable to the same kind of direction and “management” as a mechanical system….this is manifestly not the case (though it was in fact a premise of early industrial age managers); and 2) that an individual at the top of a large organization could know enough to make key operational decisions in a rapidly changing environment. The need for adaptability dictates moving general management decisions ever closer to the customer. These points would be made in an updated verson.
- The featured example would be the MBW implementation by Glen Salow at the Aetna Portfolio Management Group. This was inspired by the HBR article, and is described in Chapter 9 of Adaptive Enterprise.
The complete article is available as a download from Harvard Business School Press.
February 6, 2008
Attacking Bureaucracy with S&R Weapons
Vice Admiral Robert Conway is Commander, Naval installation Command (CNIC). Established in 2003 to align support of the fleet, its warfighters, and their families at 79 disparate Navy shore installations around the world, CNIC is a $9 billion enterprise of more than 50,000 military and civilian personnel.
Like John Ramsdell (see February 1, 2008 entry), but at the other end of the size spectrum, VADM Conway focused on the Adaptive Loop as a way of shortening decision cycles and introducing the concepts in Adaptive Enterprise. By pushing authority down to the base commanding officers, a better and faster matching of CNIC resources with customer needs was achieved. The roles at CNIC HQ Staff level now consider the base commanders and officers to be their customers, rather than the targets of top-down directives.
An interview in which VADM Conway describes the mission and direction of CNIC appears on page 34 of the February 2008 issue of Seapower. (Click on “Contents” and scroll down to Interview)
At a December 2007 year end session with CNIC regional flag officers and base commanders, Conway announced,
“We are adopting Sense & Respond because it destroys bureaucracy.”
February 1, 2008
Using the Adaptive Loop as an Organizing Principle
Dr.John Ramsdell is an expert toxicologist, and chief of the Coastal Research Branch of NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration), an agency of the U.S. Department of Commerce. He heads a staff of scientists, organized in five or six teams, one of which is an Analytical Response Team. This is a multidisciplinary group of scientists whose responsibility is to determine the cause of “mortality events” — the strange and often devastating destructions of marine life that occur unpredictably in US coastal waters. Fish kills from Red Tides are one example of these phenomena. The mysterious and often fatal beaching of whales and dolphins is another.
The Analytic Response Team (ART) was chartered to enable more effective responses to these events by the managers in state and federal agencies accountable for marine resources, ecology and public health — for example, Fishery and Wildlife departments. To carry this out, the team conducts fundamental research, devising innovative technologies (such as chemical detection methods having a resolution of one-tenth the mass of elemental hydrogen), and sifting through massive amounts of input supplied by a vast global network of scientific colleagues. The challenge Ramsdell took on was to transform their value proposition from post-mortem assessments to one of giving decision-makers much more precise information, and to make it available in time to be useful in managing the event.
Soon after his appointment to this, his first managerial position, Ramsdell began looking through business books. He found Adaptive Enterprise on amazon.com in 1999, and was intrigued by the idea of designing an organization explicitly to deal with unpredictability. Recognizing that the ART was, in effect, the Sense and Interpret support for state and local event managers, he decided to design the team itself as an interactive set of roles that corresponded to the four phases of the Sense-Interpret-Decide-Act (SIDA) adaptive loop.
January 2, 2008
Traffic on senseandrespond.com increased by 27% in 2007.
29,752 unique visits to the site generated 306,444 hits. This site continues to be the primary search result for “Sense and Respond,” and this page the most frequently visited.
December 16, 2007
Sense & Respond at a Glance
Two months before the publication of Adaptive Enterprise, The Ernst & Young Center for Business Innovation–a creation of Chris Meyer’s exceptionally fertile mind– held a Conference called “Embracing Complexity.” It attracted and featured innovators in a wide range of disciplines and was focused on how these disciplines could help organizations cope with the reality of unpredictable change — how an organization might itself become more like a complex adaptive system.
Each speaker’s presentation was captured “on the fly” by cartoonists Joe Sterling and Andy Park of Sterling Insights. These men, with no background in the concepts or terminology of the topics being presented, were consistently on the mark in their summary representations of the stories and major messages delivered by the presenters.
Here is their rendering of Sense & Respond.
For earlier News Entries, see: