An Inquiry into Principles of Requisite Agility in Situations of Complexity

© 2024, Barry L. Linetsky. All Rights Reserved

Requisite agility is a necessary strategic capability for all organizations but is especially important for organizations operating in complex turbulent environments. It is in these conditions that the old rules for optimization arising out of industrial-era manufacturing and service practices no longer seem to provide efficacious guidance: where what has worked up until now to garner success is no longer working, and confusion and fear about how to adapt quickly is settling in.

Under these increasingly extreme conditions of unique and dynamic challenges, entrepreneurs and managerial leaders need to think about how technological innovation can change the old rules and how to generate successful value propositions that can deliver profits needed to support longer-term sustainability.

This is necessary so that those challenged with leadership responsibilities can more fully capture the benefits of applied innovation and strategic relationships through effective changes of the right amount, in the right places, at the right times. 

This article is an attempt to provide some foundational principles of Requisite Agility rooted in a systems approach to comprehending and managing change — and underlying premises to support good emergent business practices — to think about and address these unprecedented challenges and guide a more comprehensive way forward for those faced with the challenge of coping with value creation under conditions of complexity.

The universal challenge we face at this time is identifying valid foundations for operating within myriad systems in our advancing socio-technological environment. The general consensus is that these higher-level problems of modern production systems under democratic capitalistic-leaning conditions, can best be navigated through the paradigm of applied systems theory, also known as complexity theory and a host of other similar names and related concepts.

Where the boundaries of managerial concern in simpler business environments could be drawn at the edges of the organization, to define and deliver value propositions to customers now often requires that managers look at the wider context in which they operate as active components of internal and external interconnected systems. 

Requisite Agility (RA) is about seeking and finding ways to succeed not as a lone entity along a linear logistics chain from resource extraction through to consumer use in pursuit of value-creation and profit, but as an active value-contributing component of a larger integrated and dynamic ecosystem, where value propositions require the entanglement of multiple independent entities acting in ecosystemic harmony and adapting in near real-time.

I have written about Requisite Agility in several blog posts which you can find here:

  1. “Discovering Requisite Agility: A New Integrated Approach to Value Creation in a VUCA World,”https://barrylinetsky.com/requisite-agility-part1-living-with-future-shock/ (Sept. ’22)
  2. “Deliver Customer Value Through Requisite Agility,” https://barrylinetsky.com/delivering-customer-value-through-ra/ (Dec. ‘22)
  3. “Guidelines for Business Transformation Under Conditions of Complexity,” https://barrylinetsky.com/guidelines-for-business-transformation/. (July ’23)

My understanding of RA has been furthered by inquiry and discussions over the past couple of years with a central group of academics and practitioners that included Dr. Philip Boxer, Dr. Stephen Clement, Dr. David Francis, Amit Arora, Scott Ambler, Geordie Keitt, Kashmir Birk, and Benjamin Taylor.

Earlier this year I was asked by Amit Arora (founder of requisiteagility.org) to develop a set of Requisite Agility Guiding Principles based on a preliminary list of principles compiled by members of the group. In this I was particularly guided by the pioneering work of Dr. Philip Boxer (asymmetric leadership.com). I wrote these principles in February 2024 based on the initial guidance provided and my own research and integration of current thinking in this applied systems theory space. This is a current revision. 

PROPOSED GUIDELINES AND PRINCIPLES FOR ADAPTING A REQUISITE AGILITY ORIENTATION

Introduction

Requisite Agility is an emerging practice of how to orient one’s thinking in the development work system capabilities of an organization within its ecosystem to acquire the ability to adapt its value propositions and respond in real-time to changes in (multi-sided) demand as they emerge dynamically within each customer’s contextualized situational need in a way that is profitably sustainable by the organization.

This set of principles tries to:

  • Articulate good governance where stakeholders use each other’s resources to achieve better social outcomes with improved efficiencies;
  • Embed societal values drawn from constitutionalism, democratic values, and individual liberties.

We will continue to refine the statement of principles through conversation, observation, and analysis to ensure their validity to guide our community.

14 Principles to Seek and Support Requisite Agility

The fourteen principles are organized around two clusters: transdisicplinarity and ecosystems, with seven in each.

I. Transdisciplinary

  1. Transdisciplinary research, innovation, and design
  2. Work across borders and boundaries towards a shared purpose
  3. Develop collaborative intelligence
  4. Embrace ambiguity through adaptive dynamic vitality (capabilities and balance)
  5. Demand continuous learning and development
  6. Seek a holistic view of wealth creation and profit
  7. Pursue mutual ethical accountability

II. Ecosystemic

8. Embrace ecosystemic unity and evolutionary adaptation

9. Adopt an ecosystem approach to embrace E2E and E2C value propositions

10. Organize around customer centricity

11. Align requisite variety to match system complexity

12. Seek common toolkits and open architecture

13. Embrace situational adaptivity

14. Welcome continuous organizational evolution

Principle #1: Transdisciplinary research, innovation, and design

  • Transdisciplinarity reflects an approach to the process of knowledge production, innovation, collaborative intelligence, and solution implementation, based on the pursuit of a unity and coherence of knowledge, recognizing that “disciplines” are a useful methodology for studying parts of any given whole. 
  • Transdisciplinarity is a different manner of viewing an ecosystem that is more systemic and holistic, seeking to connect and integrate with the entirety of knowledge about that ecosystem. Sharing and integrating knowledge across disciplines often provides insights into new and better ways of achieving valued ends and can provide insight into the appropriateness of those ends themselves. 
  • We need to embrace and learn from living systems while at the same time fully embracing an understanding of ourselves as living systems, which includes becoming transdisciplinary whole-systems thinkers. Multifaceted complex problems are embedded with of a degree of complexity that requires transdisciplinary approaches to human-centric solutions. 

Principle #2: Work across borders and boundaries towards a shared purpose

  • Borders and boundaries can be positive constraints, but they can also be misused to justify the status quo or resist changing behaviour necessitated by dynamic changes in customer values and the ecosystem.
  • In a world of increasing connectivity and blurring boundaries, multi-sided alignment and collaboration in strategy formation, sharing knowledge, and coordinated execution in pursuit of a shared purpose of value creation, is required and no longer optional. 
  • Borders and boundaries, both internal and external, are becoming more porous and a traditional governance mindset of “us and them” becomes a value-inhibitor that impairs alignment and innovation. Ecosystem partners can cooperate to produce better outcomes for customers, communities, and enterprises.
  • The context here is internal to an organization as well as across networks and ecosystems (to encompass the holographic organization—in which the whole and the parts interact for mutual benefit1), where there is a requirement to configure new systems and policies that are intended to create value for each constituent and strengthen the network’s social capital (by enhancing trust and respect).

1 Ramfrez, Lang, Finch, Carson, Fisher, “Strategizing Across Organizations,” MIT SMR, Spring 2023, 63.

Principle #3: Develop collaborative intelligence

  • Collaborative intelligence is the ability to think with others to solve problems in pursuit of a shared goal. Today, more than ever, success relies on collaboration through teamwork across traditional organizational boundaries. The world is too complex and knowledge is too dispersed to fail to embrace intellectual diversity. 
  • Thinking begets action, so collaborative intelligence strives as a method to drive innovation. This principle can also serve as a platform to support technological advances in the discovery of value creation methodologies to help humans and technology work better together as a collectively intelligent systems (or collective intelligence system), such as design thinking, agile design, and Supermind Design.2

2 See Supermind Design Primer, MIT Center for Collective Intelligence, 2021, https://cci.mit.edu/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/Supermind-Design-Primer-v2.pdf

Principle #4: Embrace ambiguity through adaptive dynamic vitality (capabilities and balance)

  • The future is always uncertain and thus necessarily difficult to plan for. This is even more true in our world because of the unforeseeable exponential effects of technology. Assessing future conditions under conditions of complexity where unknowns dominate is confusing, stressful, and risky—even exhausting. Nonetheless, high-quality decisions that are anchored to market demands and expectations and affect value-propositions need to be taken. 
  • Successful leaders in this new environment will be those capable of dynamic adaptivity and vitality, embracing ambiguity by valuing edge-driven adaptive agility and leading through forward-focused intentions and actions in the present, not just tolerating, coping, and hoping for better days. 

Principle #5: Demand continuous learning and development

  • The pace of change, the pace of scientific discovery, the pace of innovation, and the declining half-life of acquired skills are all on the rise. Individuals must seek to augment their skills and networks through an increased investment in development and mentoring. We recognize that requisite variety (Ashby’s Law) is as pertinent to individuals as it is to organizations. A recent survey indicates that 72% of executives worldwide identified as a priority the need for employees’ to adapt, learn new skills, and assume new roles, for navigating the future.3
  • Embracing, encouraging, and supporting lifelong learning and increasing individual and team skills and competencies to cope in a world of complex change and increasing collaboration is necessary to contribute and adapt effectively in the dynamic value streams of our times. Learning must now include participation in the creation of new knowledge, i.e., applied learning towards innovation to achieve desired impact. 
  • Organizations must adapt away from standard procedures and tightly specified processes suitable in stable environments where outcomes are known in advance. Complexity demands requisite agility and the ability to transfer informed authority to the edges in ways that increase value delivered to customers to match or exceed that of viable available alternatives. 

3 See “Deloitte 2021 Global Human Capital Trends Report,” https://www2.deloitte.com/ua/en/pages/about-deloitte/press-releases/gx-2021-global-human-capital-trends-report.html

Principle #6: Seek a holistic view of wealth creation and profit

  • The purpose of an organization is to create value in service to others through organized human action. Organizations are a small component of the wider economy—an unplanned spontaneous order that provides as many means as possible to satisfy as many highly valued wants as possible. The economy is a wealth creation process that arises from individuals seeking to achieve something they desire within a cooperative social framework. This is the proven formula for wealth creation and the profit needed to reinvest in sustaining further value creation, both of which are outcomes and measurements of successful value exchange. 
  • But economic profit, as foundational as it is to provide the means to healthy modern living, is only one kind of wealth. As human beings, we must also recognize and organize to serve more fundamental improvements in human physical, mental, and spiritual health and wellbeing that can be gained through a more holistic view of wealth. This includes promoting and engaging in the creation of work that is meaningful, psychologically positive, physically appropriate, ethical, and promotes increased joy, happiness, authentic self-esteem, and resilience. 

Principle #7: Pursue mutual ethical accountability

  • It is imperative that all persons respect the rights of all other persons as autonomous agents and embrace the mutually reciprocal benefits of cooperation, competition, and shared core values to establish capability-maximizing and trust-inducing work systems that emphasize excellence and ethics as foundational elements towards successful human action and social and economic betterment.
  • All persons benefit when each is virtuous, trustworthy, and respectful. Reputation on these and other dimensions within a network and an ecosystem are critically important to attracting and keeping productive partners. 

Principle #8: Embrace ecosystemic unity and evolutionary adaptation

  • Ecosystemic unity necessitates a living-system approach to addressing problems, in which all solutions are contextual and provisional in relation to judgements about human value pursuits. Living systems are also sustainable systems in that they strive via applied rationality and social adaptation towards objectives defined by the selective pressures on them in their environment, enhancing efficiency and effectiveness, and avoiding loss of economic and ecological value through malinvestment and negative environmental and social impacts. 
  • An ecosystem approach takes into consideration sustainability contributes to economic prosperity, environmental augmentation, and social development. Because interactions within an ecosystem are multi-directional, ecosystemic unity is multi-sided, where changes anywhere in the system can be the cause of unanticipated changes elsewhere in the larger ecosystem, hence the latent chaos embedded in complexity.  

Principle #9: Adopt an ecosystem approach to embrace enterprise-to-enterprise (E2E) and enterprise-to-consumer (E2C) value propositions

  • Pursuit of an ecosystem approach to creating value is a strategy for coping under conditions of complexity is appropriate where causal relationships appear to be out of reach and outcomes of multi-sided interventions are unpredictable. 
  • While enterprises are often perceived as being independent entities situated at the centre of their own world, the new digitally-enabled paradigm requires organizations to adopt a more comprehensive network and ecosystem approach to understand and identify how to prepare, influence, adapt, and create value in a world of newly emerging structural opportunities and challenges over which they may have limited control. To optimize, each enterprise must recognize its double challenge to sustain itself while simultaneously sustaining and optimizing its relationships with the larger value-generating ecosystem of which it is a part. Organizations must increasingly be simultaneously inward- and outward-adaptive, and to anchor themselves to situational and subjective customer preferences. 
  • Value creation has become increasingly multi-sided. Organizations must address and cope with B2B, B2C, C2B and C2C dynamics. In the confusion of complexity-orientation, customer-centricity to fulfill customer value deficits remains the guiding star.

Principle #10: Organize around customer-centricity

  • Customers are the arbiters and anchors of economic value-creation.  
  • Our technology-driven digital economy serves as an enabling platform for a consumer-centric market-based decision-network approach to value creation. To survive and succeed in today’s complex world of asymmetrical multi-sided value-creation, organizations cooperating and competing along the value-chain must possess the knowledge and competencies to align their value-propositions and behaviours to create and deliver what consumers value on their own terms, within the consumer’s context-of-use, as the perceived best available solution to their desires and wants.
  • Ideas meet their ultimate test in the marketplace and require an ongoing dialogue in which customer, community, and enterprise partners learn from each other, make decisions, and act, based on an expected outcome within multi-sided dynamic value networks. 
  • The best viable path to enterprise success is customer value created and delivered through an action-oriented market-based decision network comprising customer, community, and enterprise. “Make and sell” must find a way to embrace and encompass “sense and adapt.”

Principle #11: Align requisite variety to match system complexity

  • It is important that organizations and their components have the right amount of internal structure and relationships to cope with external contingencies. They require a systems capacity and capability that equals or exceeds the complexity of the environment in which they seek to operate. The greater number of viable choices one has, the more effective one can be in coping with variety. When the variety or complexity of the environment exceeds the capacity of a system to absorb that variety, the environment will dominate and ultimately destroy that system.
  • A self-regulating organization, network, or ecosystem without requisite variety (the resources and capability to adapt and cope with external pressures) will succumb to the unexpected and fail to adapt its value proposition to changes in market conditions in order to satisfy the value-quest of its intended users.
  • Organizations must maintain requisite variety through innovation and adaptation to cope with the situational complexity within the ecosystem in which they compete, otherwise they will become ineffective and fail. They must also seek to avoid excessive variety, in which they incur excessive costs that create a competitive disadvantage.4

4 See Ashby’s Law of Requisite Variety and Autonomy, Stafford Beer, https://youtu.be/bDRudRhNgy4. See Blaine Bartlett, Law of Requisite Variety—The Key To Managing Change And Innovation, https://youtu.be/nK1YgKKUXQ4

Principle #12: Seek common toolkits and open architecture

  • Requisite agility requires real-time flexibility to enable adaptive changes from rising customer expectations for responsiveness, seamless omni-channel service, and information enriched products.5 Success is often dependent on evolving the enterprise architecture capabilities of people, processes, and technology, that are necessary to ensure an integrated solution. The key is to set a course to become more evidence-based (while embracing managerial paradox and dilemmas), automated, and digitally aligned both vertically and horizontally, in ways that are able to drive information and decision-making capability to the edges. This allows faster response time within a strategic context to operational and innovation challenges and new value-creating opportunities that deliver an exceptional and profitable customer experience.

5 See J. Ross, C. Beath, “Why You – Yes You – Need Enterprise Architecture,” https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/why-you-yes-you-need-enterprise-architecture/

Principle #13: Embrace situational ambiguity

  • Requisite agility requires situational adaptivity to sustain congruency and alignment of value creation to stated purpose in an ever-changing world. Situational adaptivity is the appropriate anticipatory response acquired through awareness, understanding, and capability for sensing changes in one’s competitive environment, and adapting behaviour to balance changes in work and work systems to create and deliver optimized solutions within each client’s context-of-use. 
  • The skill of situational adaptivity with its license to explore becomes more important as we encounter increasing complexity in our working relationships, impairing our ability to see clearly and navigate direct paths to deliver valued outcomes. Often the answer is to relinquish elements of control to embrace a more participatory and dispersed knowledge approach to team-based processes.6

6 See Thomas D. Howes, “F.A. Hayek on the Discovery, Use, and Transmission of Knowledge,” Austrian Institute Paper No. 34 (2020), https://austrian-institute.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/Howes-F.A.-Hayek-on-the-Discovery-Use-and-Transmission-of-Knowledge-AiPaper-No.34-2020.pdf: F.A. Hayek, “The Use of Knowledge in Society,” American Economic Review, XXXV, No. 4; September, 1945, pp. 519–30, https://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/hayek-the-use-of-knowledge-in-society-1945.

Principle #14: Welcome continuous organizational evolution

  • Continuous ecosystemic evolution is at the heart of requisite agility. Keeping pace with the requisite amount of change in each client’s customer expectations, technology advancement, organizational capabilities and governance, and ecosystem evolution, requires leaders to orchestrate change in ways that optimize relationships between customers, workers, communities, and enterprises. 
  • Organizational leaders at all levels must be focused on discovering, enhancing, and championing edge-driven levers of change and growth, within a strategic orientation where people enthusiastically embrace goal-driven experimentation and innovation. An organization pursuing a relational strategy within an ecosystem must be a systems-thinking-oriented learning organization by utilizing and sharing the intelligence, knowledge, understanding, and wisdom needed for rapid decision-making and adaptation under complex and confusing circumstances.
  • Leaders must enable their business processes and systems to adjust to changing circumstances. The objective is to improve understanding of appropriate enterprise capabilities and competencies within an ecosystemic environment and thereby build their own unique competitive capabilities around value creation and value-enhancing delivery to all relevant constituencies.

ALTERNATIVE STATEMENTS OF RA PREMISES AND GUIDELINES

  1. Customers, not accountants or managers, define your business based on their context-of-use, and decide whether and how much economic value your work creates.
  2. Seek multi-sided value creation and delivery through networked innovation.
  3. Embrace the confusion and uncertainty of disequilibrium that unavoidably comes with complexity.
  4. Think broadly about the nature of your business as a network of systems embedded within a larger multi-networked ecosystem, and the unique role you play.
  5. Be mission-driven, edge-centric, network enabled, with a robustness to maintain effectiveness over a range of conditions and circumstances.
  6. Embrace technology advances and utilization in the service of purpose and customer value creation.
  7. Embrace systems thinking to provide context-specific structure, methods, and support for adaptation over linear approaches.
  8. Change the rules that come with innovation to more fully capture return on technology.
  9. Make continual strategic transformation and flexibility and organizational competency.
  10. Be edge-driven — value is created through permeable boundaries.
  11. Seek insights towards an effective path to diffuse confusion and uncertainty through experimentation and rapid learning.
  12. Always be learning and apply deep thinking.
  13. Treat people ethically to build trust.
  14. Embrace the multi-disciplinarity of knowledge by seeking insights through the integration and application of scientific theory, knowledge, innovation, and successful real-world practices across disciplinary boundaries.
  15. RA is a critical success factor in support of long-term value creation, innovation, and profitable outcomes.
  16. Agility must be context based and cannot be achieved through a “one-size-fits-all” approach.
  17. Every purpose-driven organization has a responsibility to adapt and develop appropriately dynamic capabilities and behaviours to create and deliver a value proposition within each customer’s context of use. The same is true with regards to employees.

© 2024, Barry L. Linetsky. All Rights Reserved

Barry Linetsky is the author of the acclaimed and best-selling book The Business of Walt Disney and the Nine Principles of His Success. He is a senior-level strategic advisor and enabler, writer, researcher, and photographer. His thought-leadership and research has been published by Rotman Magazine and Ivey Business Journal [https://iveybusinessjournal.com/?s=linetsky]. He blogs on strategic business issues at www.barrylinetsky.com. His current interests pertain to the application of new knowledge and skills to master value-creation under current and emerging conditions of increasing socio-technical complexity.

0 replies

Leave a Reply

Want to join the discussion?
Feel free to contribute!

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.