MAPAS DE GESTION PRAGMATICA
Y VISIONARIA EN ORGANIZACIONES
(M2H)

Profesor Supervisor Propuesto: Mario Tarride F.
Profesor Externo Invitado: Ph D Kenneth Massey

CONTENIDOS DE LA PROPUESTA

MAPAS DE GESTION VISIONARIA Y PRAGAMATICA EN ORGANIZACIONES

1. Resumen de la propuesta:

Todas las organizaciones intentan planear para el corto y largo plazo y ser consecuentes en las acciones que toman para asegurar los intereses de la organización para hoy y para mañana.

A fines de los años 90, Bud Vieira, en el marco de su participación en la empresa consultora Internacional BDA (Business Design Associates) publicó un Documento de Trabajo denominado “Cultivating the Visionary Enterprise”, que fue utilizado por esta empresa en Telefónica CTC Chile con el nombre en español de “Mapa de Dos Horizontes” y que esta incorporado como Anexo a esta presentación. Vieira señala en él que hay diferencias cualitativas entre pensar y actuar frente a las demandas pragmáticas del presente y anticipar el horizonte visionario de mañana. Es decir “el mañana” a largo plazo es cualitativamente diferente que “el mañana” a corto plazo.

El mapa muestra el carácter revolucionario de mover a la organización de un espacio a otro y porque al no entender el carácter revolucionario de pasar de un horizonte a otro puede atraparla en un presente continuo con un futuro ilusorio.

Prepararse para el largo plazo es un acto cualitativamente diferente que prepararse uno para el futuro a corto plazo, una distinción no generalmente tomada en cuenta en la literatura de planificación.

Producto de múltiples conversaciones acerca de este Mapa, he considerado que su tiene un enorme potencial como una aproximación a fenómenos de Diagnostico y Diseño empresarial y que sin embargo este potencial no se ha desarrollado.

Se evaluará, en base a la introducción y revisión de las distinciones del Mapa de dos Horizontes - Horizonte Pragmático y Horizonte Visionario-, estas nuevas distinciones y construirá un soporte metodológico e instrumental para su uso en organizaciones. En concreto se propone:

• Revisar las distinciones, conceptos e interpretaciones asociados a ambos espacios y, a partir de ellos,

• Explorar las posibilidades de diseñar y desarrollo herramientas metodológicas de Diagnóstico e Intervención en organizaciones complejas.

El objetivo de esta tesis es examinar el Mapa de dos Horizontes, profundizar en las distinciones cualitativas de “pasado”, “presente” y “futuro” en cada horizonte, evidenciar los problemas que surgen al no entender la diferencia cualitativa entre los dos horizontes, y, a través de una investigación aplicada, diseñar y desarrollar herramientas metodológicas de Diagnóstico y de Cambio Organizacional en organizaciones complejas para superar los peligros de procesos de planificación y gestión tradicional.

Las aproximaciones tradicionales que serán revisadas, evaluadas y reinterpretadas a la luz de estas nuevas distinciones serán:

Balanced Scorecard desarrollada inicialmente el año 1992 y profundizada el año 1996 por Kaplan y Norton que plantea un aproximación estratégica y un sistema de gestión del desempeño que capacita a las organizaciones para traducir una visión de la empresa y su estrategia en una manera de implementarla.

“The Balanced Scorecard – Measures that drive Perfomance in Harvard Business Review – 1992

“The Balanced Scorecard: Translating Strategy into Action” 1996

Reingeniería de Procesos de Negocios (BPR) descrita por Hammer y Champy como “Rediseños radicales de procesos organizacionales para alcanzar mejoras drásticos en el desempeño actual de Costos, Servicios y Velocidad”

“Reengineering the Corporation: A Manifesto for Business Revolution”: Michael Hammer and James Champy 2003

Gestión de Calidad (TQM) El Ciclo de Deming como modelo para el mejoramiento continuo de calidad

The Deming Management Method de Mary Walton y W. Edwards Deming 1992 Cinco disciplinas de Senge, el cambio visto como aprendizaje organizacional.

The FIFA Discipline: The Art. & Practica Of. The Learning Organization Meter Senge 2006

Gestión por Objetivos, tradicional aproximación de Peter Drucker a la Gestión efectiva.

“The Effective Executive: The Definitive Guide to Getting the Right Things Done”: Peter Drucker 2003

Configuraciones organizacionales de MIntzberg. Análisis detallado de diferentes configuraciones organizacionales y sus características. “Structure in Fives: Designing Effective Organizations”: Henry Minzberg 1992 “The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning”: Henry Minzberg 2000

Cadena de Valor de Porter: Modelo de análisis de actividades de una organización para crear valor y generar ventajas competitivas. “Competitive Strategy” Michael Porter 2004 “Competitive Advantage: Creating and Sustaining Superior Performance”: Michael porter 1998

Abriendo nuevos Mundos: Interpretación desde la hermenéutica de Heidegger de los fenómenos sociales, culturales y organizacionales “Disclosing New World”: Fernando Flores, Charles Spinoza y Dreyfus 1999. “Undestanding computing and Cognition”: Fernando Flores y Terry Winograd 1987
2. Justificación del proyecto de investigación o desarrollo

Esta tesis se propone revisar las diferentes metodologías y aproximaciones existentes en el ámbito de la planificación y la gestión tradicional. En torno a esta evaluación observar las potencialidades y limitaciones que ellas presentan y su eventual integración en una distinción más poderosa como la denominada Mapa de dos horizontes las potencialidades.

Una vez desarrollada la evaluación anterior explorar la fortaleza que el mapa presenta para realizar procesos de diagnósticos y cambio organizacional.

Cómo resultado final de este trabajo se propondrá un diseño de herramientas y metodologías que permitan llevar a cabo procesos de intervención en organismos de alta complejidad en cualquier industria.

3. Antecedentes generales

LA DISTINCION DEL MAPA DE DOS HORIZONTES

El mapa de dos Horizontes, desarrollado por Bud Vieria y que esta incorporado en el Anexo a esta presentación, es una herramienta interpretativa que permite observar las organizaciones en dos planos básicos:

• Lo operativo o Pragmático • Lo Estratégico o Visionario

Estas distinciones nos permiten separar las interpretaciones que existen en las organizaciones respecto de lo que acontece en el día a día y los cursos de acción que pueden transformar ese día a día. Por cierto lo que constituye ambos horizontes corresponde a intereses, preocupaciones y compromisos diferentes y que, entre otras cosas requerirá, habilidades, prácticas, estados de ánimos y liderazgos también diferentes.

Horizonte Pragmático

En el Horizonte Pragmático se distinguirán a su vez tres espacios: El Pasado. El Presente y El Futuro.

En el Pasado del Horizonte Pragmático se encuentran las consecuencias de todas las decisiones tomadas antes en la organización: Sus Activos y pasivos, sus Practicas, sus sistemas, sus estructuras organizacionales, su personal y los sistemas asociados, sus valores y creencias, etc... No es trivial llamar a este espacio los legacys o herencias de la organización. Este espacio constituye las restricciones que nos atan al ayer y configuran las posibilidades de lo que llamamos lo pragmático.

En este espacio, junto con las distinciones de creencias, practicas, estilos y liderazgos se revisaran las distinciones relativas a activos y pasivos en el mundo de los negocios de hoy.

El presente del Horizonte Pragmático se refiere al espacio de lo quiebres que las organización declara hoy. Estos quiebres, que son las declaraciones que hoy hacemos de aquello que no funciona, esta anclado a los cursos de acción que hemos tomado en el pasado y corresponden a la mayor dedicación de tiempo que los ejecutivos tienen en la organización. Nos es arriesgado indicar que una parte sustancial del tiempo gerencial esta dedicado a lidiar con los quiebres que provienen del pasado.

En este espacio, se incorporaran las distinciones de quiebres, promesas y compromisos y se revisaran las propuestas que permiten hacerse cargo de estos quiebres recurrentes

En el futuro del espacio Pragmático, se localiza la mejor situación de la organización bajo el espacio de hoy, la capacidad de resolver de manera impecable los quiebres de las operaciones del día a día, este es el espacio de la calidad y del diseño de ofertas impecables en su cumplimiento en base a las promesas actuales y a las nuevas promesas que se derivan de ellas.

En este espacio, se revisaran las distinciones de calidad, reingeniería y rediseño de los procesos actuales de una organización.

Es común a estos tres espacios que en todos ellos el cambio se realiza manteniendo la Identidad actual del Negocio. En consecuencia un desarrollo necesario de la tesis pasa por las distinciones de construcción y manutención de Identidad en organizaciones

Horizonte Visionario

En este espacio se constituyen las nuevas conversaciones que permitirían producir nuevas promesas organizacionales que rompen la situación del día a día. Por cierto, este espacio requiere habilidades, prácticas, estilos, estados de ánimos y liderazgos diferentes al espacio pragmático anterior.

En este punto se revisaran las distinciones y la forma de articular nuevas propuestas para la organización.

También se distinguirán tres subespacios denominados de la siguiente forma:

Lo visionario del pasado expresado en el desarrollo de flexibilidad a través de de las Practicas Marginales
Lo visionario del Hoy a través de la Reconfiguración con la creación de nuevas Alianzas
Lo visionario del mañana a través de la Reinvención Radical

Respecto al cultivo de flexibilidad organizacional se presentaran las distinciones de prácticas y dentro de ellas las denominadas prácticas dominantes y prácticas marginales. Este espacio permite generar nuevas propuestas de negocios e innovar basados aún en el pasado a partir de la incorporación de nuevas prácticas.

La capacidad de articular nuevas ofertas no relacionadas con la situación actual de la empresa o su entorno se construye a partir del establecimiento de nuevas alianzas con otras organizaciones que vienen de otras culturas o proveen nuevas miradas para repotenciar los negocios actuales provocando nuevas interpretaciones del negaciones que no vienen de practicas marginales sino de la posibilidad de amalgamar nuevas visiones e historias entre negocios.
En este espacio es necesario observar los estilos y liderazgos de la organización y como interactúa con otros estilos organizacionales, la capacidad de la organización para articular narrativas de futuros con terceros.

Desde el punto de vista del observador disponer de miradas para frecuentar espacios donde pueden estar los eventuales aliados y el tipo de conversación que deben desarrollarse en la organización y su entorno.

Finalmente, el tercer espacio del mapa Visionario, lo constituye la capacidad de también de plantearse la reinvención total de la organización en nuevos negocios que no estaban en el horizonte de proyección de l negocio actual y que permiten que surja una nueva Identidad empresarial en una nueva área empresarial.

A diferencia del Horizonte Pragmático, acá el cambio incorpora en menor o mayor magnitud transformación de la Identidad y del estilo organizacional.

4. Objetivo general

A partir de la evaluación del mapa de dos horizontes diseñar herramientas y metodologías para realizar diagnósticos organizacionales y el diseño de propuestas de cambio organizacional en el ámbito de de empresas e instituciones complejas.

5. Objetivos específicos

• Evaluar la calidad de los enfoques tradicionales y la posibilidad a partir de su critica el adoptar enfoques integradores de ellos • Revisar estado del arte en el espacio de Planificación y Gestión moderna. • Exponer los fundamentos de la propuesta del mapa de dos horizontes • Construcción de Metodologías y Herramientas de Diagnostico basados en las distinciones del Mapa de dos Horizonte • Construcción de Metodologías y Herramientas de Diseño de Cambio Organizacional basados en las distinciones del Mapa de dos Horizontes

6. Resultados esperados

Desarrollar un enfoque integrador de diversas aproximaciones existentes en el ámbito de la gestión y planificación de organizaciones a través de las distinciones proporcionadas por el mapa de dos Horizontes

Herramientas y Metodologías de intervención organizacional en empresas e instituciones

7. Metodología

• Revisar Principales enfoques y autores contemporáneos en materias de Planificación y Gestión de empresas: o Balanced Scorecard desarrollada inicialmente el año 1992 y profundizada el año 1996 por Kaplan y Norton o Reingeniería de Procesos de Negocios (BPR) descrita por Hammer y Champy o Gestión de Calidad (TQM) o Cinco disciplinas de Senge, o Gestión por Objetivos, o Cadena de Valor de Porter, o Abriendo nuevos Mundos

• Evaluar los contenidos proporcionados por los enfoques propuestos en base a la revisión de sus contenidos, el análisis crítico de sus limitaciones y potencialidades.

• Presentar las distinciones del Mapa de dos Horizontes como aproximación a la planificación y gestión en instituciones complejas. Desarrollo de las distintas facetas del Mapa con su explicitación de contenidos y distinciones.

• Integrar los enfoques analizados en una propuesta única basada en el mapa de dos Horizontes. Incorporando las potencialidades de distintos enfoques en una los componentes del mapa.

• Diseño de Metodologías y herramientas para Diagnostico y Cambio Organizacional en función de acoplar para cada etapa herramientas que permitan alcanzar los objetivos propuestos en el mapa.

• Desarrollo de un nuevo enfoque de intervención basado en los elementos anteriores

• Análisis de casos organizacionales relevantes de nivel mundial bajo la mirada de la herramientas de diagnostico y diseños que se propondrá en esta tesis. Entre tales casos se destacan: o Cemex o Microsoft o Nokia o Compaq o Dell o FEDEX o Zara o Google o Amazon

8. Etapas del Estudio

1. Revisión de Propuestas de Gestión y Planificación 2. Presentación del Mapa de Dos Horizontes 3. Análisis Crítico de Propuestas Actuales e Integración con Mapa 4. Diseño de Metodologías y Herramientas de Diagnostico e Intervención. 5. Análisis de Casos Organizacionales en base al mapa de Dos Horizontes 6. Redacción Final y Presentación Tesis

9. Carta Gantt
[pic]

10. Temario Tentativo I.- Introducción II.- Resumen Ejecutivo III.- Revisión de Enfoques contemporáneos en Planificación y Gestión de Organizaciones IV.- Presentación del Enfoque Mapa de dos Horizontes V.- Evaluación de los Enfoques Actuales VI.- Diseño de Herramientas y Metodologías basadas en el desarrollo del mapa de dos Horizontes VII.- Presentación del Enfoque Propuesto para intervenir VIII.- Comentarios y Conclusiones

11. Referencias Bibliográfícas: Autores y Textos

“The Balanced Scierecard – Measures that drive Perfomance in Harvard Business Review – 1992 “The Balanced Scire card: Translating Strategy into Action” 1996

“Reengineering the Corporation: A Manifesto for Business Revolution”: Michael Hammer and James Champy 2003 The Deming Managment Method de Mary Walton y W. Edwards Deming 1992 The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of The Learning Organization Meter Senge 2006 “The Effective Executive: The Definitive Guide to Getting the Right Things Done”: Peter Drucker 2003 “Structure in Fives: Designing Effective Organizations”: Henry Minzberg 1992 “The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning”: Henry Minzberg 2000 “Competitive Strategy” Michael Porter 2004 “Competitive Advantage: Creating and Sustaining Superior Performance”: Michael porter 1998 “Disclosing New World”: Fernando Flores, Charles Spinoza y Dreyfus 1999. “Undestanding computing and Cognition”: Fernando Flores y Terry Winograd 1987

Autorizado por: DIRECCIÓN DE MAGISTER
SANTIAGO, Septiembre 2007

ANEXO

DOCUMENTO DE TRABAJO BDA
BUSINESS DESIGN ASSOCIATES

BUD VIEIRA

Cultivating the Visionary Enterprise

The Pace of Change

People involved in today’s enterprises often feel overwhelmed by the fast pace of change. The need for flexibility and responsiveness in today’s business environment is intense and getting more so. The demands for change are unprecedented and more and more executives are concerned with the need for double-loop learning, emergent structure and styles more suited to make coordinated responses to chaotic environments.

Today’s environment is a far cry from the business environment of the 1960’s and 1970’s where strategic planners sought to position their companies with inflections that could produce advantages for a period of at least five years. The gap between the specialized view of the strategists and the practical need to internalize required changes helped create a discipline called “Organization Development”. Throughout the sixties and seventies, O.D. facilitators worked with business functions and interfunctional groups to facilitate team building efforts and the translation of authoritative declarations into shared concerns over how the business should achieve strategic positioning in a cooperative and coherent way.

During the 1980’s the business environment changed dramatically for many companies. International agreements on tariffs and trade, privatization of state-owned companies, the consolidation of industries, the de-regulation of many industries and the rapid development of powerful technological enablers, were some of the factors that introduced rapidly shifting competitive changes into the world of business and forced companies to respond rapidly to an evolving environment or risk going out of business. Nothing changed so much, however, as the ability of the customer to dictate the terms of the business relationship: the customer became king. Centralized strategic planning gave way to business unit decentralized planning, efforts in which those employees and executives closest to the market were expected to take substantial responsibility for competitive initiatives.

The number of contact points through which we enter directly into communication with our customers are few but they are usually dynamic. The exploitation of these contact points in order to understand our customers concerns are vital. They take place at the business unit level and are often the best lens to assess both customer concerns and competitor offers. The number and quality of these contact points and the way they are managed can actually open the way to the creation and offer of value propositions that create competitive advantages for our company and substantial profits for our customer, but often these contact points are no more than floodgates for customer recriminations and complaints.

It is during the 80’s that TQM and re-engineering replace Organization Development, aiming at the elimination of quality as a differentiator in the marketplace by reducing defects to near zero, eliminating other relevant variations and streamlining processes to reduce costs. In the automotive industry, for example, there are no longer any clear cut quality advantages and the performance of mass produced automobiles made in Korea, a late entrant, differs little from that of any other historically competent producer of motor vehicles.

In the press, we hear stories of companies that are making all the "right moves" advocated by the current common sense total quality, business process re-engineering, learning teams, and so on but are nevertheless in financial trouble. At least one company bankrupted itself after . pursuing and winning the Malcolm Baldridge award for quality and customer service. What is going on?

Becoming a Historical Evolving Enterprise

Companies in today’s world of globalization must cope with unprecedented change and those companies that have not yet cleaned house have a lot of catching up to do. At the same time, we are seeing that there are different ways of responding to change, some more successful than others. Focusing exclusively on business process mapping and redesign is still a good way to eliminate waste and improve some business indicators, but it does not by itself produce self-sustaining flexibility for companies.

Good companies take for granted that they need to be flexible, to change continuously. They now recognize that they cannot produce lasting and productive change by grafting onto a company the latest quality movement from Japan or the newest fads of the consulting world. Neither is the answer to be found in the redesign of information systems, although this may play a key role. We believe that in the end, business is a human phenomenon. And just as we focus on how people coordinate their actions to invent a new discipline of management, so we look to human phenomena of change as the foundation of a new discipline of permanent organizational flexibility.

For people, change is not instantaneous. Change is a historical evolutionary process. Over time, people build up their own personal style for dealing with the world and other people. From their past experience and exposure to cultural, professional and other traditions, they inherit different interpretations of how to cope with the world and what to expect in the future. Companies also develop a style, inheriting traditions and practices ways of doing things from their industries and their surrounding cultures. Successful, healthy people are always learning and open to new ways of seeing the world. Likewise, companies that have learned how to cope with rapid change are constantly open to developing and shifting their corporate style.

In one sense, the past is a great enemy of this kind of flexibility. If a company does not recognize that it has a style it has inherited from the past if it takes its own interpretation of the world completely for granted it will become very rigid. We believe this is one of the principal difficulties facing our companies today. It is especially a concern for large corporations that have been very successful until recently. The success itself can be blinding, leading the company to feel it has "found the secret" to growth. This can produce a rigidity to change and rigid systems get knocked out of the fitness landscape when the environment changes and are rapidly displaced by flexible marginal competitors lurking in the shadows.

We all listen to and tell stories about “legacy systems”, especially popular around the turn of the milennium, and even today no one really knows what was the total cost of patching up legacy information systems in time for Y2K. All companies have legacy systems and spend a lot of time and money building on them and integrating them to newer systems. This can often be maddening, but legacy systems continue to be useful and in most cases we cannot get along without them. It is easy to talk about a company’s legacy systems. They show up every time there is a breakdown and we can pinpoint their rigidities. They are part of our past, a necessary part of our present and will be our companions in the future.

As strange as it may seem, there can be no innovation without the past. This sounds like a contradiction, because we are used to thinking about innovation in terms of the future. But the future itself only makes sense to people according to what they already know about the world. Traditions not only guide people in understanding what makes sense to do in the present, they also determine the possibilities that people can see for invention in the future

For companies to build a permanent capacity for innovation, they must become sensitive to the particular style they already have. This is not easy since companies and people are usually poor observers of how they show up in the day-to-day world. Our interpretations about doing business are embodied in our traditions and show up in our offers, our relationships with customers, the kinds of processes we have and the methodologies we have been using to configure them. They also show up in our individual and company styles.

Changing a business interpretation from weak to powerful will almost certainly require a change in practices, styles, relationships, value propositions to our customers, the salience and worth of business processes needed to execute our value propositions as well as the way in which these processes are configured and designed. All of these changes must rest on the creation of a new sensibility and flexibility that remain well grounded in existing competencies and traditions

Evolution is now understood as something that occurs within fitness landscapes. In the face of environmental change, the systems that dominated the previous central landscape become less apt to survive than formerly less dominant sytems that held their own at the margins. This means that flexibility exists in a number of our marginal styles, practices, processes and systems. When environmental change threatens the dominant players within a fitness landscape, some marginal systems are better able to compete and to occupy the new landscape. We are often insensitive to these marginal practices, processes, systems, styles and traditions as a resource for innovation and flexibility and continue to look for answers in our legacy way of thinking and acting.

Every time a company encounters a customer, a vendor, an ally, or whomever, it must build a relationship with a person or organization that has a style different than its own. Close attention to the small ways in which the company shifts its style to accommodate others can show a company opportunities for more substantial change. Also, even though organizations may have a single dominant style, individual people and groups in the company may have their own "marginal" styles that can become more important as circumstances change. To remain flexible, a company will pay close attention to these marginal practices, as well as developments in other companies in its industry, in related industries, and in relevant professional fields.

This interpretation of organizational change is not sudden or chaotic. We don't listen to different traditions to find a style that is better than our own and adopt it wholesale. Rather, we are building a constant sensibility to ways in which our own style can be renewed and enriched from other sources. This provides a stability that is lacking in other ways of thinking about innovation. By seeking to develop our own style rather than borrow a new tradition from outside, we keep a sense of coherence and purpose in the organization. Customer relationships are not disrupted by the sudden imposition of new procedures and practices. Employees gain the sense that they are part of an evolving story, and have a more secure sense of the company's identity, future, and their own career prospects. And companies avoid the risk of entering into new fields with which they have little practical experience.

This perspective that a company has a historical style and organizational change is a historical process affect how we mobilize ourselves for innovation in all aspects of the company, from training and hiring practices, to business process redesign, to product development decisions and the formation of strategic alliances. Training and hiring not only bring new skills to a company, they put the company in touch with new styles, new historical resources. Competitive interpretations of the value proposition and their concomitant business processes not only satisfy customers, they also articulate the company's style from moment to moment. Process redesigns, new offers and new alliances introduce new practices and shift the history not only of the company, but of its industry as well.

Seeing a company as a historical enterprise can also shift how we interpret the role of information technology in organizations. More and more we are beginning to interpret computers as communications tools rather than calculators. As people begin to manage the developing traditions of their organizations, they will find that information technology can play a strong supporting role. For example, information tools can be developed that help customer representatives, quality staff, and development teams work as a unit to turn the complaints and requests of customers into new products and services. And as our companies become more interconnected, and online data services become more commonplace, more and more of our listening to other styles and traditions will take place over computer networks.

Information technology can also connect us to our customers and suppliers in unique ways, often creating the possibility for the supplier of detecting a customer need and addressing it even before the customer himself has seen it. Newell Corporation, for example, accesses the inventories of individual Walmart stores directly from the cash registers and stocks the stores directly. The bill of lading triggers both the order and the payment. This relationship, supported by information technology, eliminates much of the cost of ordering and collections and reduces the need for intermediate warehousing, creating additional profits for both partners. Strategic applications of information technology will be the backbone of coordination in which a company continually reinvents itself.

What is “Living History”?

We must now clarify what being historical means. Nobody, and no company, would want to be historical if it meant done, dead, ancient. But if it means "history making," groundbreaking, trailblazing, everybody would want to sign up. Clearly we are not interested in a history that is a lifeless past, but rather one that is a dynamic resource for inventing the future. A living history recognizes that people have had many different ways of understanding themselves and their world, and that these evolve over time.

Perhaps the most obvious example of this kind of history on the individual level is an autobiography. People would never read an autobiography that was a simple chronicle of the events of a person's life. All these events are over and done with. A powerful autobiography is alive. It allows you to enter a person's background, and gives you insight into how that background shaped his or her character. It gives you a sense of what the person stood for, what he or she was committed to achieve in life, and how that changed over time. And it gives you a sense of what that person's life has meant and can still mean for our common future.

Our company must have the same kind of sensitivity. A company is like a story written by a hundred characters, some central, others peripheral. The company's story will draw from each of their individual lives, but may survive longer than any one person and transcend all of them in its impact on the world. In their everyday work, people are not just completing tasks that lead to the production of goods and the satisfaction of customers. They are acting out, and helping to invent in their actions, who the company is, what concerns the company is committed to address, and with what practices and unique style it will do so. The future is a space of invention for developing and expanding the power of the company's identity in new and interesting ways. And the company's past and that of its people is a resource of individual themes and traditions that offer the possibility of shifting the company in one direction or another to invent a different future. What is most unusual and controversial in this perspective is the close link between past traditions and future possibilities. So we have proposed a number of distinctions to illustrate how the world shows up for people in terms of the past, present and future.

Getting in Touch with our History:

We identify three different ways in which our history constitutes our world. We will refer to these as “clearings” (or “fitness landscapes”), “disclosive spaces” and “styles”. The first way, our “clearings”, are the most encompassing, the most taken for granted, and, consequently, the most invisible.

We inherit many of our concerns about the future and predisposition for thinking, feeling and acting from our existence in a particular culture, country, and historical age. For example, we are now entering an age in which our world is confronting the effects of technology on the environment. This is becoming an inescapable concern for all of us. Already children are being raised in households where recycling is a normal part of everyday life. Likewise the moods of chaotic change and rootlessness that many of us feel are not a matter of individual history, rather they are inherited from the general moods of our age.

Clearings (“fitness landscapes”):
What we call “clearing” is simply how the world we find ourselves really is for us. It does not "show up" to us as a particular interpretation. Rather, we take all the interpretations, moods and practices of our historical clearing for granted. But if we study the histories of other cultures and our own past history, we can see clearly that people have not always lived in the same world that we take to be the objective truth. Sometimes world events rapidly change our clearings, such things as wars or economic depressions. More often than not, clearings change slowly and there can be moments of creeping crises in which the practices of an old clearing simply no longer work and new practices and traditions arise. We are living such a moment right now.

A shift of clearing is a time when our most basic understanding of ourselves, our relation to nature, and our social life is called into question. It is also a time in which entire industries can rapidly arise and disappear, a time of great shifts in power, a time of great loss and enormous opportunity.

What is it that makes a shift of landscapes possible? The most important aspect is that a clearing, or landscape, is not a monolithic, universal set of interpretations and social practices that all people in a culture share in the same way. For example, our concern for the environment is taking on new importance in the crisis of our Western technological clearing. But even decades ago, when we mostly thought of the environment in utilitarian terms as God-given "natural resources," there were people who sought to protect some wilderness from exploitation.

Clearings, or landscapes, can shift because inside of any one landscape, there are always people at the margins of the landscape who have unusual interpretations and practices, such as lobbying to set aside some land as government sponsored parks. Sometimes as people's concerns shift, these "marginal" practices can become more central, even focal practices in the clearing. Now instead of a marginal "conservation" movement opposed to the more prevalent utilitarian technological practices, we have an increasingly dominant "environmental" movement that may change entirely how the industrial world sees man's relationship to nature. The presence of different variations and traditions in a clearing what we call different disclosive spaces is a kind of "historical resource" for change in our common understanding of ourselves.

Disclosive Space

What we refer to as a “disclosive space” is a pool or string of practices that together constitute an interpretation of some aspect of the world revealed to us by the landscape we share. The most familiar examples of disclosive spaces are the professions. We readily recognize chemists, engineers, computer scientists, lawyers, and so on as people who share common moods and attitudes, common skills and a common orientation to the world. With a profession, such as chemistry, it is easier to see the historical nature of human life. For even though we usually interpret a chemist as a person who has acquired certain information about the world, we still recognize to a greater or lesser degree that chemistry is an established set of practices that we must learn before we can begin to "think like a chemist." Unless we have participated in this tradition, there are certain kinds of actions we cannot perform and assessments about the future that we simply cannot make.

Professions or disciplines can be good or bad examples of disclosive spaces. They can be seen as good because they illustrate that disclosive spaces can be "portable" from one cultural context to another. The disclosive space of agriculture, for example, is found all over the world in widely different cultures. We do not choose to live in “clearings”, we inherit them, but we may choose to participate or not in disclosive spaces like chemistry they are open to intentional learning.

Professions at the same time can also be bad examples of disclosive spaces because they focus too much on our intentional choices, and hide the variety of interpretations and practices that exist. Even chemistry, which has become a pretty stable and powerful way for us to interpret matter, has different interpretations in the form of quantitative chemistry, biochemistry, materials science and so on.

Disclosive spaces are like Russian dolls if you open up the big Western clearing you will find inside a host of different cultures, disciplines, industries, and religions that all have their own characteristic sets of practices. And inside of each of these you will find more and more local disclosive spaces, until you get down to those shared by just two people developing a business relationship, a friendship or a marriage.

The rock bottom of history and historical change for people is that we each inherit the different practices of the clearings and disclosive spaces to which we have been exposed. And when we come together for some common concern, we bring those practices together to develop a new disclosive space. That is how marriages and friendships develop, it is how clubs and teams take on a unique character, and it is how companies and industries can both distinguish themselves and remain flexible.

These are important distinctions. First of all they help us to get rid ourselves of the notion that there is an objective reality, and that change and innovation happen when we gain more knowledge or solve problems. We can see that before we can innovate, we need to be immersed in a history and tradition that allows the world to show up for us in a certain way.

For these distinctions to become operational, we as people and companies must design their own history. For this, we need a way to observe and intervene in disclosive spaces and clearings in the bodies and articulations of people. This is why the notion of style is so important.

Style

Clearings and disclosive spaces are human phenomena. They are embodied in people and so they are concrete in one sense. We can put our finger on them. But in another sense, they are social abstractions that we describe with phrases such as "space of interpretation" and "collection of practices." Style, however, is a very different kind of distinction. Style is a public assessment that constitutes our identity in the eyes of others. Our style is how others see us. While we live in and through our style all the time, we are seldom aware of it explicitly. It is "like water for the fish"; always pointed out by someone else. Fortunately, we are not fish, and we can learn to become sensitive to our styles, to cultivate them and to shift our identity.

We can understand “style” better, perhaps, by returning to our literary analogy. Characters in novels draw us in when there is a consistent pattern that pervades all of their actions and makes sense of their relationships to other characters. The hustler, for example, is always trying to get ahead, cut a deal, always promising more than he can deliver. This style call it "shallow ambition" may be central to the plot in some cases, but it will also come out in little incidents. When the hustler leaves his lady friend waiting for hours for a dinner date so that he can pursue some marginal business deal, his apology is not sincere, but it will be flowery and come with some kind of showy gift. This pervasive nature of the hustler's style pegs his identity and allows us to anticipate his actions and role in the story. Writers underline our tendency to attribute styles to people when they exploit them for their own dramatic purposes. Style is then the bridge between the particular individual embodiment of social practices and the larger social world of roles and identities.

Style is holistic and all encompassing. We don't say that a person is usually a hustler. We attribute styles to people on the basis of very brief observations; each behavior is like a reflection of the whole style. We can identify three general dimensions of style that we observe in positioning ourselves in relationships with others.

The first and most obvious dimension is that styles involve a consistent way of coping with the world that cuts across different domains. So someone with a style that we would call "aggressive" might have an aggressive way of making sales promotions, a forceful way of dealing with family conflicts, even an impatient, goal oriented way of cultivating orchids. Style "collects", as it were, practices from the various disclosive spaces to which a person has been exposed. Practices that can be pulled into alignment with a person's style help it to develop more fully. We can imagine an aggressive person thinking of his orchids as a kind of trophy.

At the same time, when a person immerses himself in a new disclosive space, he may take on practices that are not consistent with his style. These practices may be dropped when the conflict is noticed, or they may remain as marginal practices that under different conditions could become more important and shift the style itself. So, for example, the care and patience required to cultivate orchids could later help a person to develop a less impatient, driving style in dealing with long-term relationships and projects.

The second dimension is the characteristic rhythm or music that a style has, which highlights some moods and pushes others into the background. The child's classic orchestral piece Peter and the Wolf, which uses different instruments to stand for the story's characters, is a great illustration of how different styles have their own pace and tempo. These differences will pervade how people with particular styles deal with recurrent relationships. We already know that whatever the interaction, the hustler will be at home in the "negotiation" portion of the loop and careless in the "execution" sector.. Even more familiar is the way that style structures the availability of moods. The mood of peace is not readily available to anyone that we might characterize as neurotic. And the mood of ambition is not readily available to the cozy bureaucrat.

The third dimension of style, and perhaps the most important to how we form relationships with others, is the way in which we invest styles with socially recognized virtues and vices. Americans revere the hustler for his dealing skills and optimistic, aggressive, go-getter attitude, but, at the same time, despise the hustler for his shallowness, insincerity, and tendency to manipulate others.

The key here is not to see these virtues and vices as characteristics, but as critical to the way that people pursue or avoid relationships with others. Identifying people as a style that includes timidity or naiveté and the virtues and vices they imply is of vital importance to the manipulator; these people are his natural prey. Likewise, the powerful entrepreneur will be impatient with nerds, bureaucrats and engineers.

Style, then, is central to power in at least two ways. First, the attribution of virtues and vices to styles is vital to trust in initial encounters. We generate an immediate orientation to developing relationships with a person or company by inferring their general style from a few small details. So style is central to symbolic capital, a person's capacity to generate action through a network of relationships. Second, the public conversation about virtues and vices, what is right and what is wrong, important and not important, is what we call politics. So our style automatically positions us in some way in political conversations and articulates a field of possibilities for alliances.

When we make these quick attributions of style for people we have just met, we cannot possibly treat them as unique individuals. Instead, we are identifying them with one of a number of already well-recognized cultural paradigms. This is why literary characters are a good metaphor for observing style. Sam Spade is not just a particularly hard, pragmatic guy, he's every two-bit detective that ever walked off an American movie set. People don't simply invent their own style out of completely unique actions and behaviors. They inherit various aspects of their style from the different disclosive spaces in which they participate. What is unique about individuals is the particular mixture of disclosive spaces that is collected and unified in their personal style.

This is what underlies the apparent contradiction between seeing styles as stereotypes which in a general way seem to make sense of how people in various disclosive spaces tend to act and the danger of applying those stereotypes to the particular and dynamic styles of individuals. We may all know of a nerd, for example, who is also a musician, and so isn't quite so nerdy as the stereotype might suggest. Likewise a company with a brash approach to marketing in a staid industry can distinguish itself with a slightly different style. We call these individual variations on the style of a larger disclosive space inflections.

As the last example hints, all that we have said about the style of individuals is equally relevant to companies. We attribute a style to any human or social identity that we can distinguish. A culture has a style, an epoch has a style industries, companies, academic and professional disciplines, clubs, and teams all have their own styles. Any historical disclosive space has a style that constitutes its identity as an inflection of the style of some larger disclosive space.

That last sentence is pretty dense, but it presents two ways of thinking about companies that we don't usually have. First, all companies are seen by people as having a particular kind of style that determines whether and how they would be willing to get involved with that company. Second, all companies exist as inflections inside of industries with styles of their own.

We must, as companies, become sensitive to our style and understand the possibilities our style offers for accumulating power, given the competitive environment in the fitness landscape in which we participate and in the disclosive space of our industry. As the computer industry has show in the last two decades, a lot of money changes hands when the virtues of a previously successful style become vices, and new styles arise.

It is important to understand that our identities are not permanent, unknowable and internal to our selves. Rather, they are dynamic, observable, and socially defined and inherited (as are styles in the sense of fashion). It is these characteristics pointed out by the word "style" that allow people or companies to begin to observe, assess, and shift their public identities and their power in the world.

How Enterprises and Styles Show Up

In our earlier examples about autobiographies and novels, we noted that in some cases, people do new things that are consistent with the styles they have exhibited historically. We call these “pragmatic” changes. Refinements of an existing style can be called “invention in the world”. At other times, the change would be the kind we would call a “turning point” or a “watershed”, changes not predictable within the historically visible style. For example, a mid-level bureaucrat leaves a government post and initiates a company specializing in sophisticated telecommunications equipment. We call these changes “visionary” since reinvent the style. They can be called “changes of the world” since they change our idea of the world and what is possible.

Based on these two dimensions or horizons, “pragmatic” and “visionary”, we distinguish six aspects that structure any historical space, whether it is our overall cultural clearing, the disclosive space of an industry or a company, or the style of an individual. The six distinctions presented below correspond to fundamental dimensions of a business enterprise and are further elaborated in the attached charts "The Structure of a Disclosive Space" and "Aspects of Style," and in the table below "Aspects of style - operational distinctions."

Pragmatic Horizon

Operations - This is the domain of our everyday present activity and coordination with others. Acting here means following the standard practices for completing recurrent business processes. In the case of a laboratory, these are practices for conducting experiments and writing research articles. In the case of a bank, standard practices would center around making loans, maintaining savings accounts, etc. In business in general, this is the everyday activity of making standard offers to clients and assuring satisfaction.

What is central to seeing these everyday operations as part of a historical disclosive space is recognizing that all of this activity happens inside of a single understanding of the world that is taken for granted. In Operations, people are acting on the basis of habit what we have called elsewhere "transparent coping" with familiar procedures and relationships. The loan officer of a bank is clear that he is in the business of processing loan applications and approving credit for customers, period. Not only this, but he does so according to the standard practices that his particular bank has developed over time.

In these everyday activities and involvement with other people, we observe some dominant way of coping that we identify with the style of an individual or organization. If someone works eight-hour days and no more, performs according to the rules and no more, and is more concerned with his benefits than whether the customer is satisfied, we call that person a bureaucrat. If a company positions its products as the wave of the future, markets them more as a lifestyle than as tools, and draws its customers into a relationship more as "followers" than as consumers, we call that company evangelistic.

This style shows up in everyday operations primarily in terms of the kinds of relationships a company fosters with its customers and between people inside the organization. Each interaction articulates the style further and strengthens it. This is reflected in the kind of reputation the company has in the marketplace, about whether it is trustworthy and cares for its customers and its people. But also, because of the intimate customer contact, each interaction is an opportunity for the company to listen to customer complaints and see where its style of building relationships is not working.

Legacy - This is the domain of traditions and standards. What we call legacy is a kind of normalized past; actions and processes that have previously been successful are transformed into systems, standards and procedures that provide a consistent and reliable way of completing offers. It is a domain of “rigidity” and “rigidity” often has more down-sides than up-sides. While “rigidity” can keep us from deviating from the norm, it can also keep us from adapting in time to changed circumstances.

Mostly we inherit these systems and standards from the past of our companies and industries as a fixed embodiment of what is important and what is not. Manufacturing quality control standards are the obvious examples, but there are many others. For example, for a person who prides themselves on honesty, distinctions of lying, forthrightness, integrity and plain-dealing will be important. For a sales-driven organization, the central distinctions will be about making deals, market share, and quarterly targets.

The kinds of distinctions and standards that are important for people or companies are a major attribute of their styles. Each style has a language all its own. The technically oriented, somewhat nerdy computer startups of Silicon Valley have a host of distinctions about computer components and performance that most people don't understand. Another kind of insularity is demonstrated in the styles of our large, bureaucratic corporations, where there is typically a huge language of distinctions, not about products, the customer, or the market, but about how to move around in the organization.

People innovate in the area of legacy only when they stop taking their standards and distinctions for granted and start thinking of the tradition they inherit as something that needs to be managed. Continuous improvement in standards, and comparing standards and distinctions with other companies in an industry (benchmarking), are two ways in which a company can come to see whether their style is aligned with standards in the marketplace.

New Offers - This is the domain of improving, adding to, integrating and improvising. At the same time that people are performing their everyday activities according to their received traditions and standards, they are always seeking to extend those traditions to new areas. This activity helps to keep a disclosive space alive by continually generating new ways for people to participate. In business, this is the central focus of research and new product development. Companies are always seeking to build upon their existing product lines, maintain their relationships with customers by making new offers, and respond to technological and competitive changes in their markets.

The attitudes that people and companies have toward innovation is another principal aspect of their styles. Some would prefer not to change at all and generate new offers only in response to potentially dangerous competition. Some are obsessed with change and prefer never to sit still for long. In the computer industry, IBM and Intel provide a wonderful contrast that demonstrates how their approaches to innovation are colored by their overall styles. Intel is basically an innovation machine, with all of their products planned to make each other obsolete within a year, or even within months (but, they are carefully designed to be backward compatible!) They exemplify the aggressive, sleek and swift Silicon Valley style. IBM takes at least has until recently two conservative positions that are more in tune with its ponderous style. The first is the standardizer, waiting to see if there would be a market for some new development, and then coming in with their own product, image and heavy marketing to dominate the field. The second is a kind of university, in which the company has made long-term investments in world-class laboratories without any strong pragmatic direction, and which occasionally furnish it with major scientific advances that can be patented for unique products.

By and large, the new offers that companies generate elaborate and extend their current style. They are "natural" extensions of what the companies are already offering; more features, more options, faster, cheaper, more customized. This is particularly true of companies that trade heavily on brand names, where jarring the customer with an incongruous product can be very damaging. But companies also sometimes face quite unexpected circumstances, and must improvise. This need for improvisation is more acute when a company's offer has a large service component, or close partnerships with major clients, which force it to anticipate the unique future problems an opportunities of its customers. This kind of improvisation can generate new offers or products that are quite outside of the dominant style of the organization (IBM's PC may be an example here).

These new responses could only be one-time customized orders for particular clients. More interestingly, a company could become sensitive to these offers as market opportunities unmet by its current style and products. In this case, the improvised solutions could generate new standard products, and begin to subtly shift the company's overall style.

In the three preceding domains, changes are incremental. The innovation that happens never calls into question a person's or company's dominant style, identity and traditions. Evolution in the Pragmatic Horizon tends to be Darwinian, and Darwinian evolution is not only “slow” learning, it can also be “dumb” learning.

In the following domains, however, shifting the identities and styles of companies and industries is precisely the issue. Practices for observing and acting in these domains, with the possible exception of Constitution, remain largely undeveloped in our culture and in our companies.

Visonary Horizon

Constitution - This is the domain of creating identities, the domain of exploring the space of possible evolutions to declare the space in which the enterprise wants to evolve and its intention to dominate that space. As in Operations, Constitution is an activity in the present that articulates a person's or company's style. But instead of acting inside of an existing tradition, people who participate in the domain of Constitution are creating the tradition inside of which others will act. While requests, promises and offers are the lifeblood of Operations, the central acts of Constitution are declarations.

Constitution does not take place in a void. It begins with questioning the present interpretation of the business in its existing pragmatic space to assess the power of the value proposition and evaluates the present identity with in the context of other identities in the same or different spaces..

Constitution requires a powerful interpretation of how the enterprise must move in the future to have an identity-creating value proposition to customers and to gain the support of investors and employees. Customers will not favor variations on the theme when their success depends on completely new and qualitatively different offers so that they can also satisfy their stakeholders and be leaders in their environments, or know that they are involved in transactions which give them the best possible value. The identity producing proposition requires a declaration and the rules of the game. It concerns setting up the capital structure of the corporation, compensation and incentive systems, declaring the markets to be served, and designing long-term strategic alliances.

The activity of Constitution is essentially interpretation and design of style of organization and people, and the central concern is integrity. We experience this tension personally when we catch ourselves doing something that is contrary to our declared standards and the identity we want to project to others. The lack of integrity is observable to others and confusing and painful to ourselves. Likewise, if a company is going to have the integrity that attracts both customers and investors, and give employees the sense that they are participating in an honest and valuable game, policy and other declarations need to be brought into line with the declared identity and style of the organization.

Organizations, such as Dell, have declared their business strategy as a “direct” relationship with consumers, “Direct from Dell”. They have developed a trust relationship with their customers by developing world class competencies in the strategic processes that permit them to accept infinite configurations of their products, take an order by internet, produce the individualized machine and deliver it in five working days.

Industry leaders are generally those in which the identity-creating value proposition is clear and their processes, practices, resources and styles are in alignment

Flexibility - This is the domain of recognition of diversity. While in Legacy the past appears as the source of a tradition that provides powerful distinctions to live by, in Flexibility the past appears as a rich reservoir of many such traditions that may possibly be mobilized to support a new and powerful identity. In the way that we understand ourselves and our corporations today, however, the activities that engender a sensitivity to other styles remain largely hidden or absent.

We have the tendency to think of a "corporate culture" as something that is monolithic and rigid. In the terms we are using here, it is true that people who are participating in a disclosive space with a particular dominant style forget or don't see that theirs is only one way of seeing the world especially if that style has been successful for a long time. And when a person's or company's style does not fit with the evolving style of the industry or the world around them, this rigidity can be deadly. Sometimes people are simply blindsided because they are not in touch with developments that are going on outside of their dominant interpretation of the world.

But there are two principle sources of flexibility to counteract this rigidity. First, every disclosive space, including the style of a person or company, includes a number of inflections, or "marginal" styles that differ from the more dominant style, and may offer the possibility for shifting it. One dramatic example of this is IBM's current restructuring. For some time, IBM had peripheral operations, such as their Lexmark printer division, that were structured as separate companies competing independently in the marketplace. Now this previous anomaly inside of IBM seems to be the inspiration for the corporation's new structure of independent divisions.

Second, people are always in contact with others who have slightly or entirely different styles than their own. In companies, contacts with customers, suppliers, allies and others put an organization in touch with people and organizations that see the world very differently. Generating systematic practices for cultivating and observing this diversity of styles both within and without an organization will greatly enhance a company's capacity for seeing opportunities to shift its own style.

Configuration - This is the domain of reinvention of identities. While in New Offers the future appeared as an extension, improvisation, or building on an existing dominant style, here the future appears as the possibility to shift or reinvent that style in a different direction. The historical resources that are gathered in Flexibility show up as possibilities for inventing a whole new future for a company, and perhaps for its entire industry.

Again, there is little existing precedent for this understanding of a company's strategy for the future. Usually, configuration is seen as the strategic allocation of resources meaning manpower, financial capital, and equipment to offset competitive threats or take advantage of new market opportunities. But here we are talking about mobilizing a different kind of resource, the company's access to a variety of disclosive spaces and different interpretations of its industry and its own position within it. Successful interpretations are powerful for customers and shareholders and always require that processes, practices, styles and resources be viewed and re-designed to leverage the impact.

A familiar example is the rise of Sony as a consumer electronics industry giant. Sony did not invent the transistor, Bell Labs did. But Sony was able to envision that this new device, which was a marginal development at the time, could be the basis for a host of new personal electronics devices. While it may be overstatement to say that Sony single-handedly created the consumer electronics industry, it is fair to say that Sony created a new identity for itself as the leader in miniaturization, and pushed the entire industry toward that standard. What Sony saw was possible was not just the transistor radio, but a new world that they have been developing ever since.

This kind of invention of the world in the future is a playing back and forth among all three "visionary" aspects of style. First, a company must be in touch with the world of concerns in which its customer lives and how what that customer needs to be successful. The company must then be in touch with the various marginal disclosive spaces resources for flexibility that are around. Then the company must generate powerful interpretations about the kind of value proposition it can make to take a leadership position in its industry. It must then come back to look at its own marginal practices to assess which will become more important, and if the company configures itself to focus on them, they will bear dramatic fruit. Finally, the company must be able to invent a new style and pull its competencies and marginal practices into the new style, making the new declarations that will be necessary to make the shift of style coherent for the organization.

Aspects of style - operational distinctions
| | | | |
|Temporality |Past |Present |Future |
| | | | |
|Overall |Distinctions showing you what is |Practices for coordination |Symptoms of the need to inflect the |
| |relevant and important |and assessment |style |
| | | | |
|Pragmatic |Legacies, standards, procedures, |Business, infor- |Problems, reports of dissatisfaction |
| |measurements |Mation and material processes| |
| | |Value Propositions, | |
|Visionary |Moods, interpretations, disclosive |Declarations of roles, |Anomalies, marginal practices, |
| |spaces, open design |rights, rewards, |"incipient" disclosive spaces, |
| | |responsibilities |environmental changes |

Mapping the Historical Enterprise

The dimensions of disclosive space and style that we have just outlined have given us the foundations for a new theory of enterprise. Based on this work, we can identify six fundamental processes in which any enterprise will be engaged if it is to accumulate capital and power over the long term (see the attached chart "Constitutive Processes of the Enterprise.") An enterprise that is accumulating power will be taking care to manage some kind of process for its Pragmatic Horizon, by

making recurrent standard offers that provide satisfaction to customers and a revenue stream for the company; in the kinds of offers it makes, and the kinds of relationships it develops with customers to fulfill those offers, a company is articulating its style day-to-day,

maintaining equipment, systems and operational standards at a competitive level; in preserving and improving its standards, the company is keeping its past tradition and style alive and giving meaning and direction to employees' work,

listening to the dissatisfactions of customers and the opportunities for new ways to satisfy them, and developing new products; in inventing new offers, the company is extending its style to include new relationships with customers and open up new markets,

It will create more powerful interpretations of how to create significant value propositions for customers and investors in its Visionary Horizon, by

designing the game of the enterprise as a space for accumulating capital and power; in declaring its games, roles and incentives, the principal executives of the company design how the organization will turn financial capital, equipment, and the skills of its employees into revenue streams, cash flows, and returns to shareholders,

keeping the organization in touch with the evolving fitness landscape, relevant historical developments outside of the organization, and perhaps of its industry, as well as its own marginal practices, declaring powerful competitive offers that create identity, and by developing an explicit, recurrent process for observing marginal practices and historical anomalies the organization, the competence to generate powerful interpretations and building a permanent capacity for flexibility,

developing priority and enabling processes to support the identity-creating promises, and positioning the company in relation to the emerging new disclosive spaces that can be cultivated as new sources of power; in creating an explicit, recurrent process for anticipating the emergence of marginal traditions, and mobilizing its priority process around value promises derived from powerful interpretations the company is positioning itself to shift its style to take advantage of new developments ahead of its competitors.

Shifting Styles

We have laid out the structure of a business enterprise as a historical and evolving disclosive space, and shown how the different aspects of an enterprise contribute to its innovation and growth. Along the way, we have pointed out that in order to continue to build power, sometimes a company must shift its style. But just how is that accomplished, really?

The first thing to see is that a shift in style is not something that can be simply declared. A disclosive space is essentially a bunch of practices people have for dealing with the world. So shifting the style of a company means getting people to engage in different practices. A change in style can be promulgated and cultivated by a company's leadership, but it cannot be imposed by fiat.

That being said, we also have to recognize that a company's style is changing in small ways all the time. Again, this is because any disclosive space is a bunch of practices. Because the employees of any company are constantly in touch with other disclosive spaces; in their relationships with customers, vendors, government officials, their families and friends, their reading, etc.; they are constantly taking on new practices and bringing new practices into the organization. These new practices will generate small local inflections of the company's style, any one of which could prove to be important some day.

The question is not whether to shift the style of the company, it is whether this shift will happen by design or as an inevitably late reaction to the myriad of influences out in the marketplace. By the time all the little changes add up to a new consensus in the organization, a company's window of opportunity for really profiting from change has most likely been lost. But to begin to take charge and design the style of the organization as outlined in the previous sections, a company must be able to cultivate what we call "historical sensibility." The leaders of a company at the very least have to be able to see the organization as a kind of garden of disclosive spaces and styles, in which they are going to identify and cultivate the most promising, and prune and perhaps kill off others.

But this of course simply begs another question, which is "O.K., so how do we develop this kind of sensibility?" The first component of the answer is: by taking the distinctions and interpretations that are offered here into the real world, interrogating our own companies and our customers' through them, and seeing what we have learned. And the second component is: by developing as a systematic practice the kind of effective listening that people have always engaged in to become sensitive to their style and the styles of others. This amounts to developing new kinds of collaborative relationships.

Listening and Sensitivity

Shifting the enterprise from the essentially pragmatic to the powerful interpretations of the visionary horizon is a purely human undertaking and cannot be done through the legacy styles that we have inherited and seem to serve us well in our day-to-day coping with business as usual.

Creating powerful interpretations and re-configuring the enterprise around new value propositions requires a shift in our own styles. This amounts to a fundamental transformation in how we see ourselves, others, and the world in which we move. Becoming sensitive to our own style and the styles of others involves a certain kind of conversation, that we call "listening for partnership."

Ways of relating to style
| | |
|Sensitivity |Encountering another style that we recognize as an authentically different|
|(Collaboration) |way of interpreting the world |
| | |
|Recognition |Getting in touch with the central practices that exemplify and constitute |
|(Articulation) |our style |
| | |
|Relevance |Getting in touch with the opportunities that other styles offer to inflect|
|(Reinvention) |our own style |

The first aspect of learning anything in this kind of conversation is to be sensitive to the fact that the person to which we are speaking indeed has a different way of encountering the world than we do. For example, suppose that while speaking with someone they get offended by one of our remarks (not a customer, we hope!), a response that completely startles us. Now we could just say that the person is overly sensitive and go on with our conversation. On the other hand, this kind of unexpected reaction can be a clue that this person has an authentically different style from ours. These little details can be like warning flags for us to pay attention and see how we can observe other aspects of the person's behavior as clues to their fundamental style. This is the kind of making space for another person to be different, and to learn from that, that we have called collaboration.

As our engagement with another style develops, we gradually build up a picture of the central practices and distinctions of that other style. As we said earlier, these may appear in the form of some kind of cultural paradigm, such as the "hustler" character or the "commanding general." At the same time, the contrast of this newly named style with ours brings the central aspects of our style, usually forgotten, into sharp relief (recognition). This is what we have previously called articulation, the sense that in the conversation both parties are getting clearer about who they really are. Finally, as we begin to get a sense of our own and the other person's style, we also get a sense of how the two styles are relevant to each other, that is what new possibilities could be created by a partnership that shifts the styles of both (which we have previously called reinvention)?

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