by Philip Boxer The conditions for triple-loop learning require that the enterprise becomes edge-driven. This places it on dispersive ground. The identifications that need to be supported on dispersive ground are those involving triple-loop learning….
Category: Governance
Governance from the centre that is not based on knowing better than those at the edge.
by Philip Boxer The goal of e-Government is to enable government to become more responsive to its citizens while at the same time reducing its costs. We did a study for a government that wanted…
by Philip Boxer
The need for Through-Life Capability Management (TLCM) represents a step-change in the relationship between purchaser and provider that involves both parties in the whole value cycle that requires systems to be understood as more than socio-technical, and makes it necessary to model the structure-determining as well as the structure-determined processes.
by Philip Boxer
Strategy-at-the-edge requires that a double challenge be met which balances internal changes with external opportunities. The effects ladder provides a way of agreeing what this means for both customer and supplier where the customer’s demands are necessarily asymmetric.
by Philip Boxer
A proactive, demand-driven East-West dominant approach is needed to achieving step-change. A North-South dominant approach, based on encouraging Trusts to make step-changes through implementing published best practice guidelines, cannot work because it cannot deal with the complexity.
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…
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.