🌿🧭🌳 OD111: Nature is efficient and effective 🍏
Curated resources on Strategy ∙ Org Design ∙ Org Development ∙ Adjacent fields
Starters
1 of 4 / EODF Book Club: Viable Systems Model reading lounge
If you are curious to learn more about the Viable Systems Model that we featured in OD108, join the reading lounge hosted by Bülent as part of the EODF Book Club, on March 5th.
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2 of 4 / Strategy in Praxis: The Law of Stretched Systems
Good food for thought from JP Castlin that can be applied to viewing business ecosystems, organizations, teams and individuals as “stretched systems”.
In complexity science and resilience engineering, the phenomenon is known as the law of stretched systems and has been proven to hold time and again: every system is stretched to operate at its capacity. The more RAM computers have, the more RAM browsers will require for tabs. The faster networks get, the bigger web pages will be.
(…) time freed up by, say, automation in operations will immediately be filled by something else, typically justified by the same desire for efficiency that drove the innovation in the first place.
In theory (and sales argument), we can do more, faster, better, and cheaper. In reality, what we imagined would relax workload conversely increases workload; we work the same hours, but are asked to do more in them.
(…) For strategy, the law of stretched systems means (among other things) that the more successful we are, the more change we will bring about, as other adaptive units will do their utmost to take advantage.
(…) The market creator does not compete merely against individual firms, but the trial and error of the market itself in a constantly changing environment.
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3 of 4 / Farzan Sajahan: Startups need strategy
Had this conversation many times. Famous last words: “We are a startup, we don’t need any strategy, we just need to execute”.
Farzan offers 3 inflection points, when the nature of the startup’s strategy usually changes:
Review and update your startup strategy around these 3 inflection points.
[1] Establishing the product-market-fit.
Strategy at this stage is quite simple – test your hypothesis with few customers, take feedback and refine your idea.
[2] After establishing product-market-fit.
The most pertinent questions here are
- How to find and serve more customers?
- How to create value for the company?(…) By this time, your company would have developed some product competencies, intimate knowledge about the customer needs, but still would lack real organizational capabilities to grow further.
[3] After Rapid Expansion.
(…) Your choices would become increasingly larger as the opportunities and the players to compete or collaborate with start to increase.
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4 of 4 / Alex Nesbitt: That’s a lot of strategy
Image from Stratechi depicting various types of strategies around elements of a business model.
We’re sharing it here for reflection purposes.
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Main
Nature is efficient and effective 🍏
We invite you to explore Life’s Principles, summarised by Biomimicry 3.8.
Hoping to spark curiosity about the field of biomimicry in general and for connecting the dots with organizational and individual life in particular.
Much of what is captured in these diagrams is an assemblage of more than 15 years of work practicing and teaching biomimicry.
Life’s Principles are design lessons from nature.
Based on the recognition that Life on Earth is interconnected and interdependent, and subject to the same set of operating conditions, Life has evolved a set of strategies that have sustained over 3.8 billion years.
Life’s Principles represent these overarching patterns found amongst the species surviving and thriving on Earth.
Life integrates and optimizes these strategies to create conditions conducive to life.
By learning from these deep design lessons, we can model innovative strategies, measure our designs against these sustainable benchmarks, and allow ourselves to be mentored by nature’s genius using Life’s Principles as our aspirational ideals.
Principles: Sub-principles
Be locally attuned and responsive: Use readily available materials and energy; Cultivate cooperative relationships; Leverage cyclic processes; Use feedback loops.
Adapt to changing conditions: Maintain integrity through self-renewal; Incorporate diversity; Embody resilience.
Evolve to survive: Replicate strategies that work; Integrate the unexpected; Reshuffle information.
Use life-friendly chemistry: Employ elegant processes; Use a small subset of elements; Do chemistry in and with water; Break down into useful and benign constituents.
Be resourceful with materials and energy: Fit form to function; Recycle all materials; Use low energy processes; Use multi-functional design.
Integrate development with growth: Self-organize; Build from the bottom-up; Combine modular and nested components
Dessert
1 of 2 / Explanation Avenue: Scorpion Anatomy: Fascinating Insights 🦂
Wish there were 3D visual explainers like this in other fields as well.
Did you know that scorpions adapt the composition of their venom depending on the threat or type of prey? 🤯
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2 of 2 / Foreign Affairs: The Next Global War
Systems thinking from the world of geopolitics (highlights ours):
(…) all it would take is a clash in the contested western Pacific to bring about another awful scenario—one in which intense, interrelated regional struggles overwhelm the international system and create a crisis of global security unlike anything since 1945.
(…) the ties between revisionist powers are flourishing and Eurasia’s regional conflicts are becoming more tightly interlinked.
(…) tensions across Eurasia’s key theaters stretch U.S. resources thin by confronting the superpower with multiple dilemmas simultaneously. The revisionist powers aid each other simply by doing their own things.
(…) These are all symptoms of a bigger problem: the shrinking ability and capacities of the U.S. military relative to its numerous, interrelated challenges.
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Bon appétit!
Menu created for people who lead organizations and for those who help them do this in a better way, by learning chefs ✨ Raluca and Bülent Duagi 🌿.
As the Sense & Change team, we’re working as Strategy & Org Design advisers and facilitators for leadership teams of mid and large 🇷🇴 Tech companies.
See also: LinkedIn / Personal Strategy newsletter / Affiliations: IASP, APF, EODF, IAF