by Philip Boxer North-South dominance works when the environment can be assumed to be symmetrical to North’s assumptions about it. As the variety of actual demands on the organization increase, making this assumption increasingly less…
Author: philipjboxer
by Philip Boxer
A turbulent environment is one that has a life of its own that can no longer be ignored by the organisation, i.e. it becomes asymmetric in a way that cannot be ignored. A vortex is what happens when organisations are not willing or able to adapt to this environment – they continue to ignore it, not because it is not there, but because they have no way of responding to it.
Must we then fall ultimately into this vortex? It depends on whether we can find it within ourselves to take up the double challenge these environments pose to our identities.
by Philip Boxer
East-West dominance requires networked forms of organisation that can hold ‘the edge’ accountable for the way it uses the resources of the supporting organisation, but in relation to the situation in which the demand is arising. This contrasts with the hierarchical forms associated with N-S dominance. What is at stake is the performativity of what is done in relation to the demand at the edge, rather than the performance of what is done against centrally (symmetrically) defined criteria. It is not that hierarchy isn’t still necessary, but rather that it has to be situationally rather than universally defined.
by Philip Boxer
It is the personal nature of the response to the customer that distinguishes taking power to the edge of the organisation. It used to be possible to rely on ‘free’ market processes for creating such innovations, but in the 21st Century the whole cycle has to be managed. This presents those leading at the edge with a double challenge, but it also presents business leadership with the need to develop a capacity for asymmetric governance.
by Philip Boxer
The double challenge involves not only responding to the customer’s demand at the edge, but also creating the organisational context that will sustain that response.
by Philip Boxer
This interoperability landscape describes a layer mediating between the demands of users within their contexts-of-use and the supply of services from APIs. We are interested in using this form of analysis from the point of view of particular new forms of demand to see where there are gaps in the resultant landscape. These gaps will identify risks that will need to be mitigated if those new forms of demand are to be satisfied. Asymmetric design is our name for the process for identifying and mitigating these gaps.
by Philip Boxer The following questions were asked by Larry Hirschhorn about the blog on empowering the edge role, following which are my responses: Larry: You say that edge work is breaking out almost everywhere….
by Philip Boxer Preliminaries An edge role is on a task boundary in which the systems of meaning on either side of the boundary are different: some form of translation is required. The task facing…
by Philip Boxer
What is at stake is the ability of organisations to organise themselves around the needs of their customers, instead of requiring their customers to organise themselves around what the organisation is able to provide.
by Philip Boxer
Asymmetric demands require you to pay attention to what you don’t know…