Recently I wrote about the Ambidextrous Organization. This quick article follows that idea further. This time I think about how you can begin to approach dealing with the complexities of the hydra of an ambidextrous organization.
There is a line of thought around the idea of business cycles that you have at least three levels of business the first is your normal business that is established, this is your core effort and what you know works well and reliably then you have the idea of tweaking what works to create some improved version of what you currently have. You are reaching the same market segments as before, but it's just "New and Improved." Then you have a possible cycle of taking an old idea and expanding it into a new area by tweaking it just a little to meet a new market segment. This is still a refinement of an old idea you really haven't come up with something new yet.
Finally, there is the new idea generation business. Something that upsets the old order. It eats up the value in the old market or even makes it disappear. Up to this point, we could probably manage the change and how important it is because the old ideas are just expanded and everyone understands how expanding the existing idea works. But now we are contemplating how to destroy what provides the monthly bottom line profit. We are eating our cake.
This means we are taking resources from the main business effort and putting it toward something that destroys our proven market. But wait! If you know your old market is going to die, then why hold on to it? Because it is more comfortable for us as humans to remain with what we know, no matter how bad it is than to take a chance on something we don't know about. For those people in an organization working with dying products or services, they haven't known anything else, so getting them to support something they don't understand or worse yet that will destroy what they have worked so hard to build up, will be difficult at best.
Dealing with The Ambidextrous
So, how does leadership deal with this dilemma? If you are going to try and deploy an Ambidextrous Organization one option is to be transparent about what is going on. Have a firm and workable transition plan for phasing out the old line and launching the growing innovation. Leadership has to have a consistent, unified message. If people know what is going on and why they can accept the change much better than discovering change is happening in spite of their best efforts.
An even better way is to get people engaged in how to make the transition happen for themselves. When they design their own transition, they own it. Yes, you will still have competition for limited resources, but you now have an open and transparent plan to manage around. Now you can at least work on having more than one direction going on inside an organization. In fact, it might mean you have several different options moving ahead at the same time. But if each one has a published objective, even if they are in direct competition with each other. In the end, the winners are winners for everyone.
So, if you find you have competing ideas that want to take away from your core business, look hard at them and then come up with a way to openly test, validate and then move them ahead if they are successful. For if they are, they are probably your new future. If you remember from an earlier post, about testing and failure, having a plan and executing it is where success comes from.
Go to [The Ambidextrous Organization]
Part of the Innovation Maturity Model Series.
