Embracing our core and leveraging these to the best of our abilities is a great place to start undertaking and preparing organizations for necessary change. This begins a journey so it is not simply efficiency we are looking for but achieving a much higher level of effectiveness to be ready to make changes ahead less disruptive.

Do you really know your capabilities, competencies and capacities?

In most cases, an organisation has a capable, familiar core – and improving the performance of this core will contribute a significant value at a lower cost and faster than introducing new tools, but the need is to understand the how, where and what.

Existing tools don’t often require being replaced by new technologies, but knowing the data flow and having greater analytics needs changing, updating and improving. Changing and improving existing processes can be much faster than introducing new approaches and tools requiring new skills.

Is this the early adopter stage for shifting towards a new Ecosystem design? Build on what you have first and then make a staged, purposeful move towards a change that is transformational, partly gained from learning from the existing first.

For nearly all, the ability to fully connect up the organization across people, processes, design, structures and strategies is always a work-in-progress, never worked upon to the fullest extent. What do we miss in not having that connectivity? Recognizing and addressing silos of unconnected knowledge needs changing.

1. Focusing on making technology work across organizations, internally and externally, with partners that share a common purpose or cause to find new growth engines and, more, sustaining business value. it is our understanding to make exchanges work to enable creativity, and we need technology across processes to talk to each other- called interoperability.
2. Uncertainty, fear of the unknown, reluctance to share and partner or to mutually “pool” intellectual property or our research know-how in a shared collaborative effort is hard to let go of and embrace a new way of believing, trusting and collaborating.
3. We must ask the important questions and fully recognize the answer to “what do we do well? How can we leverage and build out from this?” Knowing our core capabilities, competencies and capacities.

My view is getting prepared is to shape what you have, explore and extend what is already on hand to strengthen the organization for the changes ahead. This enables the organization to be at the highest point of their effectiveness, primed, by design, to make a more significant leap to a radically different way of undertaking business.

Know your capable, familiar core and find ways to extend it.

Leveraging known technology will encourage their existing understanding of working across the organization, strengthening common language and culture before venturing across to other organizations leveraging what they know internally and the availability of known data from their core.

This will impact the assessment and adoption of technology providers ready to support any changes taking place in the organization’s processes, structure, and knowledge systems.

If this is leveraged correctly, they will have orientated to support their customers’ performance, preferences and needs, using and extending existing products and services rather than looking to sell them new products where there are steeper learning or adoption curves.

Lower the need for new higher-end technology or analytical skills and build these on familiarity, in knowing yet extending existing core capabilities, systems and processes so this understanding “flows across the organization” ready to make the next step of the needed future transition towards a new way of working within Ecosystems and across broader platforms and different organizations.

Be positioned in the leadership position to shape the platform design by learning, exploring and extending on a gradual, defined pathway from a closed system into an open, highly collaborative one.

Shaping what we have for the big shift we will need of designing for Business ecosystems

One really big shift that might be ahead of many organizations is the one towards Business Ecosystem thinking and design. Leveraging the known, established core with a clear view of what this step means in getting the organization ready for the transformational step across to opening it up to Business Ecosystem thinking and design is one of the most valuable preparation steps to take.