This session covers the anticipative organization, the second of the three how building blocks. Its objectives are to understand the ways to partner internally and externally, to define what it takes to build winning ecosystems, and to discuss the leadership implications.
The how building blocks are open culture, anticipative organization, and whole-brained, and they exist to deliver on the what: abundant markets, multiple models, and evolving experiences.
Key findings
- The session opens with a finding from a Bain study: asked what their number one impediment to growth was, 95 percent of Fortune 500 CEOs answered that it was themselves and their own dysfunctional and siloed organization.
- The IRG Growth Study asked leaders about removing internal barriers to growth. Fifty percent of overperformers rate themselves good or very good at it, more than double the 22 percent among underperformers, which also means half of overperformers struggle with it.
- LinkedIn data from the Growth Study shows internal bridges matter. Senior leaders in overperforming organizations are five and a half times better connected to junior people than executives at underperformers.
- Marketing and sales professionals at overperformers are three and a half times better connected to HR, IT, and finance.
- The agility change is not incremental. Overperformers do not nudge the organizational oil tanker slightly, they create fit-for-purpose micro-battle teams of the right six or eight people for a specific job.
The flock of birds
The image the session uses is a flock rather than a tanker. These organizations act as highly synchronized constellations, moving toward an opportunity or around an obstacle while guided by the same unified vision.
The myth it sets against that is that improving flexibility requires redefining everything, including the RACI. The leadership job in an anticipative organization is removing barriers to growth.
Google’s innovation area is used as the cautionary example. Even set aside on campus, it was still required to use standard Google tools and processes and only Google-developed software, and the creatives there were incentivized for team collaboration rather than individual breakthrough thinking.
Connectivity between marketing and sales is singled out as urgent because commerce has exploded, and the ownership question over social commerce matters less than whether it is fully integrated.
What agile looks like at Spotify
Spotify started as a Scrum company in 2008 and later made the standard practices optional, on the view that agile matters more than Scrum and principles matter more than specific practices. The Scrum Master role was renamed agile coach, because the company wanted servant leaders rather than process masters.
A squad is a small cross-functional self-organizing team, usually under eight people, sitting together with end-to-end responsibility for what they build, from design through deployment to operations, and a long-term mission.
Autonomy means the squad decides what to build, how to build it, and how to work together, bounded by the mission, the product strategy, and short-term goals renegotiated each quarter. It is defended as motivating and as fast, because decisions happen locally rather than through managers and committees.
Alignment and autonomy are treated as two dimensions rather than opposite ends of one scale. Low on both is micromanagement. High alignment with low autonomy means leaders say both what to solve and how. High on both means leaders define the problem and teams find the solution.
The conclusion is that alignment enables autonomy: the stronger the alignment, the more autonomy a company can afford to grant. The analogy offered is a jazz band, where each musician is autonomous but they listen to each other and focus on the whole song.
Connecting inside and outside
Four internal mechanisms are offered: reverse mentoring, a shadow board, an intrapreneur board, and hackathons. Reverse mentoring pairs younger, more digitally savvy employees with senior leaders so decision-makers stay aware of technology trends and ways to reach consumers.
GE popularized the practice by pairing 500 senior and junior employees, and the study finding on senior to junior connectedness is attached to it directly.
Externally the options are a challenger board, customer innovation, community connection, and partnering with the UN Global Compact. A challenger board is a group of outside experts asked for unbiased feedback, valuable because they do not hold back for fear of their career prospects.
The worked example is the Dove Challenger Board, created by Fernando Acosta to bring in expertise on women’s empowerment and beauty, with members drawn from Gucci design, the Empowerment Institute, iVillage, and Bliss Spas.
Those meetings ran twice a year, always opening with an open listening session, then a discussion of one question: given the brand’s purpose, what should we be starting, continuing, and stopping, and who else should we be talking to.
What the leader does about it
Partnering is described as something that requires investments of time, money, and energy rather than happening on its own. Four leadership actions are named: a dedicated partnering team, inviting partners early, shared success metrics, and leading by example.
The stated key learnings are that an anticipative organization is agile and well connected, that success requires seeing the organization as part of a larger ecosystem of partners, suppliers, and customers, and that the leader’s role is to demonstrate collaborative and agile thinking.
The workbook asks where the participant’s organization is leading and lagging on this building block and what is blocking or facilitating success, then asks for a concrete action with a who, a what, and a by when.
The optional pre-reads are a piece on the permissionless corporation, a conversation with Haier CEO Zhang Ruimin about overthrowing a century of organizational orthodoxy, and The Ultimate Marketing Machine, the first Harvard Business Review article by the IRG founders based on the Marketing2020 study.
Scope and limitations
Two of the headline figures come from outside the IRG study: the 95 percent impediment finding is attributed to a Bain study, and the connectivity multiples come from LinkedIn data rather than survey responses. The internal barrier scores are self-assessments.
Source
This page summarises SESSION 9: Anticipative Organization, by The Institute for Real Growth (IRG), 2024.