There are specializations, there are skills, and not everything can be contained within one company. You have to rely on the ecosystem. And the ecosystem is a test. If you cannot get the ecosystem going, it will tell you where things are going to fail for you. A viable ecosystem is one where all the different entities have an economically viable model at different levels of profitability.

—Gurdeep Pall

Imagine if Michael Jordan showed up to a one‐on‐one basketball tournament in 1990, laced up his shoes, played a pump‐up song in the locker room, and raced out onto the court, fired up, only to realize that this was a five‐on‐five tournament, and not a one‐on‐one tournament.

This happens in the market on a regular, if not daily, basis.

Organizations form surprising and remarkable alliances, leveraging their combined core competencies, channels, investments, and brands to form an ecosystem, pivoting the competitive dynamic from organizations competing against each other head‐to‐head to an organization competing against an entire ecosystem of organizations.

The intentional design and development of an ecosystem serves not only a competitive function, but also in building market dynamics that contribute to the inevitability of a future that requires more than one organization to bring to pass.

Designing for Inevitability: An Ecosystemic Discipline

When a person or organization envisions a future they would like to bring to fruition, such as in the combined processes of future solving, functional reimagining, and organizational reasoning, in asking and answering the question “What would have to be true to achieve this future?” and in determining subsequent theories and hypotheses against which to reason and test, if that future has any range of depth and breadth, there will be dynamics outside the control of that person and organization that can either be accounted for within the construct of a collaborative ecosystem, or unaccounted for and only monitored in hopes that the progression of these dynamics will support the envisioned future.

These dynamics, unchecked, assuming no market disruptions or upheavals, will follow the direction and vision of the organizations that have the most influence and strongest vision over the segment of the market in which that dynamic is at play. If partnerships are formed that account for a subset of market dynamics that most contribute to the likelihood of creating an envisioned future, organizational reasoning can evolve to ecosystem reasoning, in which a broader future, that of the ecosystem, is envisioned, the function of that ecosystem reimagined in the broader context such as the market and society, leading to the development of theories and hypotheses to be tested and proved and disproved in a context of joint investment and accountability.

Building an Ecosystem

The first step in building an ecosystem should begin without the context of an existing ecosystem, instead focusing on what ecosystem would best support the envisioned future of the organization.

If an organization has solved for the future it would like to bring to fruition, reimagining or reforming its function within the context of the systems in which it exists, such as the economic system, the market, and the education system, and the organization has created an organizational reasoning tree or trees, the developed strategy will hint, both directly and indirectly, as to what would be required of an ecosystem and therefore what functions the other players within the ecosystem would need to serve.

There is a variant form of chess referred to as “Bughouse,” which is played on two chessboards by four chess players broken into teams of two. This form of chess is so popular that most tournaments include a Bughouse tournament (along with a speed chess tournament) in the days preceding the main event. Bughouse retains all of the rules of traditional chess, with the addition of a few extras. The core additions start with the ability to pass any captured pieces to one's partner, who is playing as the opposite color. In the next move or any time after, each player can either make a normal move with the pieces on the board or place a piece captured by their partner on the board instead of moving one of the existing pieces. Once any player is checkmated, the opposing team wins the match. This means that if I see that my partner could checkmate her opponent if only she had a pawn, I could take a pawn regardless of how well it was protected, sacrificing a higher‐value piece in order to hand my partner the pawn, which could then be placed on the board to win the game.

In building an ecosystem, this analogy represents an organization that begins with any subset of pieces on the board of the market or whichever broader system(s) of which it is a part. After having envisioned and set its sights on a desired future, the organization can subsequently assess what pieces would be required to make the envisioned future inevitable (or as close to inevitable as possible). This can then be examined against the existing pieces on the board to determine whether those pieces are sufficient, or if other functioning parts of the ecosystem need to be partnered with or created.

The next step necessitates an understanding that an organizational ecosystem is a social system, and each organization is also a social system, made up of individual people with a vast array of worldviews, values, skills, priorities, and modes of working.

Building an ecosystem is an act of orchestrating those social dynamics, fueled by values and on the foundation of economic viability in order to achieve a shared vision for the future.

Maintaining versus Sustaining an Ecosystem

One of the pitfalls to be wary of when working in a position aligned to the development and management of an ecosystem lies in interacting with ecosystem partners mechanistically instead of socially, or as machines within a broader machine (maintaining) instead of as humans within a social system (sustaining).

This takes place when managers and leaders responsible for the partnership between two organizations focus on actions instead of interactions. If a technology organization, for example, partners with and certifies a consulting firm to deliver solutions with their technology, one aspect of the partnership will likely include setting the strategy for and executing joint business development. In building internal dashboards across partners, a data‐driven approach would list the partners, ranked by the number of sourced and closed sales deals.

This metric is not unimportant, but if discussions and business reviews with partners are focused on the number of sourced and closed deals, the number of certified solution architects, and even the number of projects that have made it into production, this is reductionist thinking, which assumes that cause‐and‐effect relationships are simple and predictable: if we can get more deals in the pipeline and more solution architects trained, we will close more deals. And if we close more deals, we will get more projects into production.

Systems thinking takes the more complex dynamics into account, focusing instead on the interactions between the parts and the performance of the system as a whole. If a partner is pushed to get more deals in the pipeline, the pressure could result in fewer qualified deals, producing the same or fewer closed deals; and if they are required to produce more solution architects by a certain date for a product they are still uncertain is going to turn into a viable practice for them, they may put junior solution architects through the training to meet the number and rely on architects from the technology organization to deliver and train their architects until they see a stronger and proven economic opportunity that justifies pivoting their strongest‐performing solution architects from consistent, billable work to a new, unproven product and partnership.

What would have to be true for the parts to better interact to achieve the desired outcome?

A social systems vantage point starts with asking a question unrelated to the number of sourced deals or any number, but about the humans that comprise the partner organization and how they make decisions, for example. What would have to be true to warrant a greater investment from this partner? What vision or signal would they need to see in order to bring this product to their top customers for whom they are a trusted advisor?

These are social questions, and the answers will vary significantly based on partners even within a specific technology or industry vertical. This is more complex than managing all organizations in the same manner based on a set of metrics and threatening to end partnerships with partners who do not meet certain metrics within a specified timeline, but yields significant long‐term impact on individual and organizational ability to form and sustain partnerships that achieve meaningful impact.

This lens can be combined with the idea of seeing all the pieces on a chessboard, as treating every partner in the same manner and requiring them to follow the same process detracts from or eliminates the ability or interest for that organization to leverage their full set of pieces.

I observed this firsthand when a large organization was interested in partnering with a technology product team. They were discussing acquiring one of the smaller partners who had been partnered with the technology product team for years and had become a key partner, but when their request to meet with leadership and set a shared vision at the onset of the partnership was met with the instruction that they would need to go through the same process as the other partners who were a fraction of a percent of their size, they lost interest in bringing their whole chess set to bear for that partnership. The technology organization's desire for uniformity took precedence over engagement with their partners as fellow social systems with whom they could develop and sustain a symbiotic ecosystem.

Surprising and Remarkable Partnerships within an Organization

In the consumer market, Apple is an elegant example of systemic orchestration, so much so that this is baked into the very interactions of their products. If a user wants to pause a movie on an AppleTV device and they have misplaced the remote, they can pause or navigate the television with their Apple Watch or iPhone. The memorable aspect of this story is not the performance of any of these individual products, but their interaction. The degree to which systemic design has been applied across their product set is memorable, and no doubt has contributed to their sustained market leadership position. Apple changed the consumer electronics dynamic from a string of disconnected products to choosing between ecosystems. Instead of asking only “Which smartphone has the best performance?,” customers are asking “Where will I watch my movies, play my games, store my images and videos, communicate with friends and family, track my fitness, and listen to my music?”

This kind of remarkable product ecosystem can only exist in the context of an organization that has developed a strong internal ecosystem, with surprising and remarkable partnerships. The idea that a watch should be able to navigate television controls is a surprising one, and remarkably useful when a customer comes across a situation in which that would be the easiest way to navigate the television.

The process of envisioning the future, determining which pieces would need to be on the board, and subsequently examining which pieces would need to be partnered with or created can be applied within organizations, yielding surprising and remarkable market dynamics for clients and customers with a higher degree of agility and joint focus than is possible in partnering with external organizations. Organizations can apply this approach within the safety of the internal organization to develop methodologies and to test and prove or disprove various models, frameworks, theories, and hypotheses, increasing the likelihood of successfully engaging with, building, and sustaining external ecosystems.