“Deliberate strategy relies on senior leaders to set goals and develop plans and strategies to achieve them. Emergent strategy is a strategy that emerges from all over the company, over time, as the environment changes and the organization shifts and adapts to apply its strengths to a changing reality.”

Experimentation Is The New Planning | Fast Company 

An analogy for understanding emergence and self-organization: Scounts from an ant colony going out looking for a new nest. One finds a site it likes and recruits another ant to come and look. If the second one makes the same evaluation, it recruits another… and so on. A tipping point comes when enough ant scouts are recruited and the behavior changes. Ants stop recruiting and begin making the move.

via Fast Company reprint from The Connected Company  by Dave Gray and Thomas Vander Wal.

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SXSW 2012 - The connected company: an inventory of the possible

I am happy to say that the SxSWi panel that Dave Gray asked me to join is available for your reveiw (and vote!) on the SxSW PanelPicker here.

I think the panel is phenomenal. I’ve known Dave only a few years, but he is a big picture thinker, now at Dachis but the founder of XPLANE, the visual…

via stoweboyd:

[Stowe: This is right in the wheelhouse of IBM’s efforts around Social Business, which of course is also a Dachis Group forte]

(via stoweboyd)

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Stowe Boyd: A Liquid, Not A Solid: A City, Not A Machine


Dave Gray is onto something with his Connected Company project (with Thomas Vander Wal), which is ostensibly looking at the way companies are changing as they move away from statically designed hierarchies and processes to dynamically self-organized networks:

Dave Gray, The Future Is Podular

One of the most difficult challenges companies face today is how to be more flexible and adaptive in a dynamic, volatile business environment. How do you build a company that can identify and capitalize on opportunities, navigate around risks and other challenges, and respond quickly to changes in the environment? How do you embed that kind of agility into the DNA of your company?

The answer is to distribute control in such a way that decisions can be madeas quickly and as close to customers as possible. There is no way for people to respond and adapt quickly if they have to get permission before they can do anything.

If you want an adaptive company, you will need to unleash the creative forces in your organization, so people have the freedom to deliver value to customers and respond to their needs more dynamically. One way to do this is by enabling small, autonomous units that can act and react quickly and easily, without fear of disrupting other business activities – pods.

A pod is a small, autonomous unit that is enabled and empowered to deliver the things that customers value.

via stoweboyd:

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