Regenerative Uncertainty – creating space for innovation

I thoroughly recommend following Vaughn Tan on LinkedIn, or subscribing to his newsletter, on innovation and uncertainty.  He works with much larger organisations than I do of course but there is always food for thought for me on how to apply his thinking to my framework.

Today’s tasty dish is generative uncertainty, or how to make uncertainty work for you instead of against you.

A problem for any size of business is balancing consistency with opportunity.

Your clients want to broadly know what’s going to happen over the next days, weeks and months in and around your business.  And so do you.

At the same time, you want to be able to take advantage of any unforeseen opportunities that might crop up and avoid or at least weather any unexpected shocks.

In other words, you want your business to stay the same, even if you want it to be bigger, and you also want it to be able to change at short notice.

Traditional management structures – hierarchy, silos, bureaucratic workflows – help to keep a business the same, by centralising control and slowing down the business’s reactions to events.  Which makes it hard to change.

Complete self-management at the front end enables a business to react rapidly, because control is distributed, but makes it much harder to stay consistent, can lead to wastefulness of shared resources, and at worst leads to entropy.

Vaughn’s solution is to design spaces where innovation is directed, (Clear Guardrails) but within that direction, is free to come up with whatever it likes (Encourage Emergence), and where the ‘parent’ organisation is prepared to put time and money into emergent ideas that look promising without knowing beforehand what that support might look like (Be Ready to Provide Flexible Support).

I think small businesses can provide this kind of space too.   Without having to introduce the usual corporate structures.

Here’s how I do it:

Clear Guardrails:

Your Promise of Value, Unbreakable Promises and Customer Experience Score are yuor Clear Guardrails:

• Your Promise states what you are here to do and for whom.
• Your Unbreakable Promises set the boundaries of what you are willing to compromise.
• The Customer Experience Score provides a floor for how you do it at the moment – the least that should happen.

Encourage Emergence:

• Every individual playing your Customer Experience Score is free to use their knowledge, experience and judgement to interpret the Score in the best way possible for the client in front of them.   That means every actual Customer Experience can be quite different, yet consistent.  When someone encounters a new situation, they can deal with it.   The Score encourages emergence.

Be Ready to Provide Flexible Support:

• The value of encouraging emergence comes from recognising when something is an opportunity rather than an exception.   It’s unfair to expect someone to do that on the fly, so your Customer Experience Score includes an ‘Improve Process’ Activity, that runs alongside making and keeping Promises.
• Improve Process is about regularly gathering and interpreting feedback, both as individuals running your own performances of the Score, and together as a team, to identify opportunites for both playing the existing Score better and creating new Scores to meet new challenges or opportunities.  People can give each other the flexible support they need to take advantage of useful changes.

Discipline makes Daring possible

What do you think?