IDEAS is the acronym for the five internal ExO attributes that help you to manage the abundance your Exponential Organization will reach by implementing the SCALE attributes. The five ExO attributes that focus within the organization are Interfaces, Dashboards, Experimentation, Autonomy, and Social Technologies. Understanding the particular nature of each type of abundance you seek helps you determine which IDEAS attributes best support your business operations.

Where have you tapped into abundance with the SCALE attributes you've selected?

What corresponding IDEAS attributes will manage this abundance, thus enabling agility and adaptability?

INTERFACES

DASHBOARDS

EXPERIMENTATION

AUTONOMY

SOCIAL TECHNOLOGIES

Interfaces

There is an explosion of information happening, yet people demand quick access to relevant content that cuts through the clutter.

– Anne M. Mulcahy, former chairperson and CEO, Xerox Corporation

How will your users—your customers, partners, staff and others—interact with your company? How will data be effectively exchanged? External abundance needs to be filtered and managed to be useful. Interfaces allow this to be done in an effective, targeted, and seamless manner.

Interfaces are an automation of one or more SCALE attributes. They are the matching and filtering processes—using algorithms and automated workflows—that allow an organization to translate an abundance of data into meaningful information that can be acted upon. They are the bridge between the drivers of exponential growth (external) and the drivers for stabilization (internal).

Interfaces automatically direct actionable chunks of input to the appropriate internal departments for action. Automatic routing eliminates the limitations and errors common to manual processing and is essential in positioning your business for scaling.

Interfaces can either be what your users interact with or what other systems interact with. For users, the user interface (UI) is the visual part of the software application that they interact with. To be effective, the UI must be built with a good understanding of user experience (UX) needs to ensure it provides a delightful and easy way to engage with your product or service. For systems, application programing interfaces (APIs) are the code-based connections your systems will have with external (or internal) systems in order to gather and exchange data and functionality.

Dashboards

Measure what is measurable, and make measurable what is not so.

– Galileo Galilei

Traditional annual or quarterly reporting cannot keep pace with the changes taking place in the current business environment. The hypergrowth that characterizes ExOs requires tight control frameworks and the ability to quickly course-correct. Information that influences your decision-making now needs to be available as close to instantly as possible.

Dashboards provide the real-time information you need to run your business. They reflect essential company and employee metrics, and allow short feedback loops to be implemented. The popular saying, “What gets measured gets managed,” applies here. In the case of ExOs, where growth is so rapid, dashboards are essential to allow management decision-making to keep up with the pace of change.

A dashboard is simply a screen that provides a visual representation of data that is important to the viewer. Dashboards are designed in a variety of formats to suit their particular purpose, but their function is to consolidate critical performance metrics all in one place, making it easy for users to stay updated on the information most relevant to their business.

Making dashboards accessible and transparent to everyone in the organization enables learning and motivation and can support a collaborative and open atmosphere.

SAMPLE USE

Facebook knows that effective enterprise communication is fundamental for a fast-moving business. Supporting the productivity of over 25,000 employees demands an innovative approach to sharing information.

The internal tools team at Facebook created a framework to allow company dashboards to be easily created and customized. A dashboard creator may want to display statistics, such as the number of active users or the number of friendships created every day, or include internal newsfeeds that reflect employee activity, such as internal statuses from across the company or all code reviews done by engineers on a specific team.

As one example, Facebook's internal communication team created a company dashboard with information about product launches, company announcements, events, internal notes from people around the company, and an internal status update stream where people post topics of interest for discussion with coworkers.

Given the broad span of unique business needs across the employee base, customizable dashboards allow Facebook teams to monitor data trends and information relevant to them while promoting openness and transparency across the organization.

EXPLORE!

Have a look at these companies from a Dashboards perspective. For the first four examples, think about what real-time metrics would be essential to them. For the others, explore how they support the implementation of dashboards.

Experimentation

The real measure of success is the number of experiments that can be crowded into 24 hours.

– Thomas Edison

In their early stages, ExOs are similar to startups—both are still in search of a scalable business model. As Steve Blank advises, “In a startup, no business plan survives first contact with customers.” Any new business model is not a set of actions to be executed, but rather a set of assumptions, or hypotheses, to be validated.

On the other hand, an ExO can also be an established organization trying to adapt to industry disruption—or perhaps even lead it. In this case, the ExO must continually come up with new ideas, such as new products, services, or processes. All of these must also be considered hypotheses, which must be tested before executing at scale.

Traditional business or product plans are built on a vast number of assumptions about what the market needs. Experimentation is the act of validating your assumptions before making significant investments. Each experiment creates a set of learnings that you then use to improve your product, service, or process.

Whether an ExO is a new organization or an existing one, it must continually run experiments in order to learn how best to evolve. One of the best approaches to implementing Experimentation within an ExO is the Lean Startup methodology, which focuses on running fast feedback loops. These allow an organization to incorporate learnings and make adjustments before significant time and expense have been incurred on a given path.

Experimentation is done within multiple organizational departments, enabling a cultural acceptance of risk-taking. Risk-taking provides a strategic edge and results in faster learning. It keeps processes aligned with rapidly changing externalities and products aligned with real needs.

SAMPLE USE

Tata Motors, India's largest automobile company, operates globally through subsidiaries and partnerships. The company understands that securing a future in a rapidly changing business environment requires keeping pace with the advanced mobility solutions space.

Tata introduced TAMO, a separate and vertical division, as an open platform to network with global startups and leading tech companies. It was also designed to transform the experience of interfacing and interacting with customers and the wider community. Through the TAMO ecosystem, Tata can experiment with low-volume, low-investment vehicle models in order to provide fast-tracked proof of technologies and concepts. The results of these experiments contribute to the design of future mainstream products and services.

In essence, the Lean Startup process starts with a set of ideas and runs a Build-Measure-Learn loop to evaluate them:

The Build-Measure-Learn loop reduces your investment in new ideas—innovative products, for example—and reduces waste, since there's no need to spend time developing features for which you haven't confirmed a need. The faster and more frequently you can execute this three-step loop, the more you learn in a shorter period of time.

Variations on this process may be a good fit for your business. Sprint: How to Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just Five Days, by Jake Knapp of Google Ventures, outlines a design sprint that skips Build. The Service Startup: Design Thinking Gets Lean, by Tennyson Pinheiro, advocates beginning design sprints in Learn. When to introduce an MVP vs. a mock-up or prototype can also be explored.

CHECKLIST FOR SUCCESS

Have we clearly defined assumptions that drive the business?

Are we asking questions of value?

Are our experiments generating valuable results?

Are we continually growing and improving based on results?

Is experimentation a core value in our organization?

Have we defined a smooth, flexible process for capturing and leveraging new knowledge, including the use of a tool to categorize results?

Are we including time for feedback and product improvement in our budgets and plans?

Autonomy

Those who say it can't be done should get out of the way of those doing it.

– Chinese proverb

Increased speed of decision-making, accelerated innovation, and rapid testing of ideas are examples of what teams can achieve when they are not only unencumbered by fossilized processes, rules, and reporting structures, but also permitted to self-organize to meet shared goals.

Autonomy refers to the use of self-organized, multi-disciplinary teams that operate with decentralized authority. This approach stands in contrast to traditional organizations characterized by the rank and procedure of hierarchical structures. ExOs applying autonomy are characterized by flatter organizations with highly motivated self-starters who are empowered to innovate.

Autonomy can be applied in different ways. Within an organization, it enables core teams to operate with greater agility and flexibility, thereby allowing the organization to adapt more quickly to a dynamic environment. It can also be applied to staff external to the company (Staff on Demand), which allows them to operate more independently, thereby offering the organization greater potential for exponential growth.

Autonomy is not the removal of control; instead, it is the imposition of self-disciplined freedom for individuals and groups. It offers the benefits of increased agility and flexibility, faster reaction and learning times, and better employee morale.

Some common frameworks that support the Autonomy attribute are:

• Agile product development frameworks such as Scrum or Kanban support autonomy across product development teams. These frameworks are frequently used at software development companies but can be applied to any kind of company.
• Objectives and Key Results support autonomy and agility across organizations. They extend beyond product development activities to the entire organization, ensuring that the efforts of all teams and individuals are both cohesive and flexible.
• Holacracy is an example of a networked, rather than linear, organizational design and management model. It allows organizations to dynamically form teams to tackle temporary goals and challenges. Another example is Teal Organizations as described by Frederic Laloux in Reinventing Organizations: A Guide to Creating Organizations Inspired by the Next Stage of Human Consciousness.
• Black Ops or Edge Teams are examples of groups established at, or beyond, the boundaries of an existing organization with permission to make independent decisions relating to their work and projects. This increases the speed of decision-making and leads to more innovative, agile operations and breakthrough ideas.

Social Technologies

Alone we can do so little; together we can do so much.

– Helen Keller

Social technologies are the tools that allow your community of employees, staff on demand, customers, and others to communicate quickly and easily. These tools result in faster conversations, faster decision cycles, and faster learning. The lag time between an idea being shared, accepted, and implemented can be essentially eliminated.

The Social Technologies attribute is not about encouraging the use of social media for marketing. Instead, it is about improving internal operations by encouraging social interaction via technology—which includes communications, collaboration, and workflow—and exploring how to do this well.

Social Technologies encompass communication tools (such as social messaging and discussion forums), collaboration tools (such as cloud-based document management for sharing and real-time editing), and workflow tools (to manage tasks and activity streams.) They allow your organization to benefit from an entirely digitized communication base. Tools create transparency and lower an organization's information latency—the time it takes for information to get from one place to another.

ExOs use the Social Technologies attribute within the organization to allow staff to collaborate in real time, drastically reducing cycle times. Teams stay connected and stabilized even in rapidly changing environments. Wikis, blogs, social networks, and web conferencing are mainstream methods of collaboration, while Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality tools are rapidly emerging.

ExOs also use social technologies beyond the boundaries of their organizations to connect with customers and other members of community. Social environments can be created to drive information used for the development of your products and services in support of the Community & Crowd attribute. Products and services can be designed with the social element incorporated.