Mutable Business™

Mutable Business™

Today’s business landscape has never been more challenging, or more exciting. Even before the COVID-19 pandemic the rate of change in the last two decades was increasing exponentially. We’ve experienced even more change since 2020 with new technologies and the big shift to home working. Global supply chains are under pressure. New business models are emerging. Everyone’s talking digital transformation, a term that’s becoming too much of a catch all, and in any case, it puts the focus on technology, when we believe we should be talking about business outcomes and value creation. Welcome to Mutable.

Here at Bloor we see our role as the navigator, helping CIOs and business leaders to understand, manage and prioritise their strategy, and helping vendors with the clarity of their messaging and propositions.  To be effective as an organisation today you have to think about more than just technology.

It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.”

Leon  C. Megginson (often misattributed to Charles Darwin)

The same is true in business. That’s why, from our research on both successful and failing organisations, we’ve developed a framework for dealing with today’s disruption. As Bloor Analyst Martin Banks puts it, “all businesses are now (even if they don’t accept it yet) in a state of permanent transformation to new business models“. We call it Mutable Business™, an approach explaining “How organisations can successfully transform in a continuous way”.

Whatever industry sector you are in, we can guarantee that your business model is under threat by some smarter organisation using software, hardware, algorithms, and the internet in a different way, with a new business model, to disrupt you and steal your market. To outperform them, you need to think in terms of competing with yourself, constantly. You need to transform your organisation in to a “Permanent State of Reinvention”.

We are dealing with new customer and stakeholder behaviours, disruptive technologies, changing regulatory policies, international conflict, and the effects of globalisation on our supply chains. Yet many CIOs and senior executives that we meet feel their organisations aren’t capable of driving the transformational changes necessary. We believe you can, if you look at your organisation holistically, end to end in terms of Business, People, and Technology.

In terms of Business you need to think of new business models, new ways to create value, different market places and ecosystems, as well as new information flows and changing your processes to be more responsive.  Whatever size you are, within your approach you should be planning for an enterprise scale business but avoiding enterprise level overheads.  You need to deploy your proprietary assets and look to create superior capabilities. You should be out-investing the competition, designing better products and services, and looking at new ways to serve your customers. And to do that you’ll need to attract the best talent.

Business transformation only succeeds with the right leadership and by empowering  your People and getting them on board with the big idea. You need to think in terms of employee engagement, collaboration and fostering an environment for creativity and innovation with the freedom to experiment.  That Mutable leadership style and workplace practice contributes to the Future of Work topic that has come to the fore since the pandemic forced the fastest and most significant change to the office and work environment that any of us have seen in our lifetimes. The two concepts interlock, interact and support each other.  The smart firms have shifted focus from monitoring time spent in the office to focussing on outcomes, and empowering their people to choose how they work most effectively. Mutable Business™ leaders have an open mindset, an unbounded culture, and they promote strong team cohesion, a strong sense of purpose, and passion for the work the company does.

In all of this business change, Technology is the driver. The shift to cloud, social, mobile and other emerging technologies is at the heart of supporting your change. We have been evolving our research focus for the past ten years and believe we are in a new data driven era of Software Defined Business, and Big Software which allows organisations to effectively virtualise their entire architecture, even create a Digital  Twin of the business. With data as the cornerstone of your solution, you will consider all of the options to deploy the right infrastructure for each of the many insights you are looking for. You will look at app modernisation and Software as a Service, with a focus on user experience for your people, your customers, and your partners. You’ll need to deal with the opportunities of IoT and the explosion of connected devices and the data they collect, looking to apply AI and automation across the whole technology map to both add value and remove costs. Our approach allows organisations to abstract, personalise and optimise all their business processes for true business agility.

But don’t forget all of these changes need to work through your Stakeholder Engagement, by which we mean your customers, suppliers, business partners, employees, shareholders, investors, advisors, media organisations, regulators and any other communities that connect with the business. All aspects of the approach need to be governed by Trust, and the successful organisations deploy a Design Thinking mentality in everything that they do. Across all of this, the smart organisations are thinking Agile, not just in their approach to development, but in their management style and their business practice and change management. Your transformation should not be seen as a single, long project, but as continuous improvement programme, with what we call short throws – an iterative approach with 2-4 week sprints, and manageable milestones.

Blogs related to Mutability

In the Mutable Business™ framework an organisation maintains a permanent state of reinvention, so that it can survive today’s disruptive business landscape, by adapting its Business approach, its Technology and its People. Your leaders and managers and co-workers are at the heart of the transformation your organisation needs to make to become mutable – you can’t do it without them. The people factors expand in to our Mutable Business™ – People framework.

It starts with Leadership. Our research shows that the digitally savvy companies have leaders who encourage teamwork, explain their purpose with clarity, and promote an environment of openness and sharing. In her book The Management Shift, Vlatka Hlupic shows that many successful companies share a management style characterized by an open mindset, an unbounded culture, strong team cohesion, inspirational leaders, a strong sense of purpose, and passion for the work the company does. These are the characteristics that 21st century leaders and managers need to be able to handle in today’s rapidly changing business landscapes. To get employees, customers, and investors on board, leadership needs to communicate the big idea—the “why” of what they are trying to achieve by reinventing their business.  Following the pandemic and the big shift to homeworking for many knowledge workers, smart organisations like Siemens announced publicly a change in their working culture and leadership style.  They now focus on outcomes rather than on time spent at the office, empowering their employees to choose the work environment where they can perform to their best.

There has been so much research produced over the years showing that Employee Engagement really does help the bottom line that no one can deny that benefits really do exist. We can show that it drives customer satisfaction which drives profits. There are analytics now behind employee engagement which are key to the whole process, from interview questions to the proactive retention of the best employees. In successful organisations the Human Resources or Talent Management function now has a seat at the table. For your business to be mutable you need all of your employees to be on board.

Successful mutable businesses look at their Organisation Structure. There are many options for effective organisations, from quite structured hierarchies to very open styles – there is no one “best” option. What you should be aiming for is the adaptability, agility, and cohesion of a small team with the power and resources of large enterprise. The most successful organisations combine transparent communication with decentralised decision-making authority. You need to break down the walls between silos. We recommend learning lessons from military thinking, the approach of special forces, and the wisdom in General (Ret.) Stanley McChrystal’s book Team of Teams. The best practices of the smallest units can be translated to work across organisations with thousands of people using the right approach and technologies to get everyone on the same page. The Mutable Business™ – People framework is faster, flatter, and more flexible.

Peter Drucker supposedly said Culture eats Strategy for lunch. In truth your company strategy is very important too – this isn’t an either-or situation. However, for transformational change the company culture is a vital factor. Successful companies have a strong identity. The founder knew their “why”, their reason for being, the core purpose of the venture they started. That translates in to the Shared Values of the organisation. We are strong supporters of the McKinsey 7s approach to organisational effectiveness. Both in its model, and our Mutable Business™ – People framework, Shared Values are at the heart. The values are the norms and standards that guide employee behaviour and company actions. They are the foundation of every organisation. In carrying out your reinvention you need to work with the company values in order to enable change; or begin to change the culture in the right direction to support the shift that you will need to make.

Surrounding the Shared Values are two more ingredients. The more successful organisations are better at Storytelling. It is a skill we all have to get better at. At all levels within your organisation storytelling allows us to digest information more easily and connects that information to emotions. Whether it’s the leader explaining why, a manager making their case to the C-Suite, or a team member talking to a customer, your messaging needs to be clear, unambiguous, consistent, and factually and morally correct.

To be a mutable organisation you need to adopt a Startup Mindset. You need to think more like a small team with limited resources, but with a vision to scale to enterprise level quickly. Don’t reinvent the wheel, if a solution exists leverage those existing resources. Think prototype and Fail Fast, but assess the risks, managing the impact of failure to avoid regulatory and legal compliance issues. Think about getting things done, asking for forgiveness rather than permission. Collapse your time to market.

Startup thinking goes hand in hand with an Agile approach to processes and management, doing things in short, iterative cycles with the customer at the heart of the process, but to be truly mutable you need to add more. Lean thinking allows you to deliver amazing products that delight customers as efficiently as possible, and a continuous Learning mindset will help with this too. You should be constantly thinking about what works and what doesn’t, correcting your course as you go. “Post implementation review” is an opportunity to do things better next time, not an opportunity for assigning blame. These are the management characteristics that combine to make you mutable, and more successful.

The smarter organisations recognise that the ability to mobilise the collective intelligence of all of their organisation is key. Collaboration is vital for the Mutable Business™. True collaboration is a mix of cooperation, coordination and communication. The best companies implement some form of social collaboration or enterprise social network to connect their people. That helps them create, innovate, and solve problems together. It helps them involve and mobilise the right people across different functions. It helps their teams learn from and with each other. However, effective collaboration needs investment, mentoring, and guidance in support of whatever workplace technology you’ve chosen. By making workplace data easily accessible, we are entering a new era supporting transformation, with collaboration helping at the heart of the value chain.

In today’s rapidly changing business landscape of connected markets and new technologies the Mutable organisation needs to foster Creativity and Innovation. Without them you are in danger of being left behind like a Kodak or a Blockbuster or a Nokia. Traditionally, organisations allocate resources to basic research, but look to find breakthrough innovations by thinking differently, looking at adjacent markets, synthesising ideas across domains, or by learning to embrace a more open innovation approach with diverse resources and partnerships. The Mutable Business™ encourages this approach and creativity at every level of the organisation. We define creativity as the process of having original ideas that have value. You need to promote that culture, along with allowing your people to learn by doing and encourage them to take risks. Creativity is about fresh thinking, and new ideas, and those are the life blood of business reinvention.

Finally, this Mutable Business™ – People framework can’t operate stand alone but has to drive and support your Business models and ecosystems, as well as harnessing our Mutable Technology framework to provide the right tools to get work done.

If you want something new, you have to stop doing something old.

Peter F. Drucker

We are dealing with new customer and stakeholder behaviours, disruptive technologies,  changing regulatory policies, and the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, international conflicts, climate change, and globalisation on our supply chains. To be a truly Mutable Business ™ we believe you have to look at your organisation holistically in terms of the three dimensions of Technology, People and Business. Looking at the business dimension, true “Transformation” is a sustainable change big enough to move your enterprise to a different level, but it can’t be seen as just one change project, and it shouldn’t be over-complicated. Ultimately you need continuing step changes in your current business approach and the value created. You need to:

  • increase revenue or market share
  • improve customer delight
  • cut costs, without significantly impacting revenue, market share or customer delight.

In this evolving environment of new business models and digital thinking there is a constant flow of change from the new and novel to the institutionalised. It doesn’t matter if you are in media, electronics, or paint manufacturing, and it impacts everything from project management to purchasing to finance. Our framework guides the way.

Business Models

We are big fans of Alexander Osterwalder’s Business Model Canvas as a guide to review your approach. It asks you to map out your:

  • Key Partners
  • Key Activities
  • Key Resources
  • Value Proposition
  • Customer Relationship
  • Channels
  • Customer Segments
  • Cost Structure
  • Revenue Streams

In reviewing your model, you need to think differently. How do you defend against low cost disrupters? How do you address shifts in the basis for competition? Are there adjacent markets, an underserved or not served constituency? How can you disruptively exploit new markets or technologies? Can you learn from markets in other countries or different industries? Do you have something you could sell to your competitors? Are there fashionable, important or existential factors like inclusivity, diversity, sustainability, or global warming that help or hinder your journey towards your objectives? Have you considered all of your stakeholders? Nothing should be off the table in your exploration of permanent reinvention.

Whatever size you are, within your approach you should be planning for an enterprise scale business without enterprise level overheads. You need to deploy your proprietary assets and look to create superior capabilities. You should be out-investing the competition, designing better products and services, and looking at new ways to serve your customers. And to do that you’ll need to attract the best talent.

Marketplaces 

It is our belief that in today’s business landscape there are no “one size fits all” solutions. You may operate offline, online or both and be thinking in terms of multiple channels to the customer. You may deal directly with the customer, get your suppliers to drop ship, or sell through a marketplace. You need to reduce the friction between the buyer and the seller, wherever you sit in the supply chain. You need to consider all of the ways to motivate and reward your sales people and partners. You might be shifting your approach from products to services and considering subscriptions as an option. You might consider the freemium  approach, a free option that can be upgraded to a paid premium service. You’ll be balancing marketing spend versus risk. You might sell through online marketplaces that are open or curated. Can you turn your own product in to a platform, join an ecosystem, or even create your own marketplace? The Mutable Business™ keeps its approach to the market under constant review.

Ecosystems

The Mutable Business™ embraces a market pull model instead of the traditional market push model. The push model requires a single company to promote and sell what it has, absorbing all of the costs on its own. Joining an ecosystem enables a company to better address the customer’s need, as it can bring a diverse set of capabilities and innovations to provide a more complete solution more quickly. Taking lessons from biology, ecosystems provide resistance to invasion and provide resilience against external change. In joining an ecosystem, you will need to focus on your core value proposition and consider the complementary offerings that will add value and create a more complete solution that will delight your customer. You need to consider your part in supply and how you enable the network. In turn, the network effects will add value and result in a positive feedback loop.

Processes and Flows

Most organisations large, medium or small may have a company-wide IT system which is either an integrated package, or assembled from best of breed components covering the very structured processes and data models required by your particular industry sector for customer relationship management, enterprise resource planning, human capital management, business intelligence, service, support, marketing and the customer experience at “the last mile” or on their mobile device. In deploying software tools to manage these processes and flows you need to recognise the exceptions that occur day to day. Within these flows you need to recognise the:

  • Goods and services you are providing
  • Money and credits that you collect and pay
  • Information you are tracking and collecting on your customers, suppliers, and partners and how you can turn that in to more value
  • More intangible value that your business is creating, and how you can harness that.

You need to shift the balance of the flow to effectiveness (doing the right things) over efficiency (doing things right). Adaptability is the key survival trait in today’s business environment, and that adaptability characteristic, handling the exceptions over the rules, needs to be designed in to the apps and business systems that support the way your business works.

Measurement

What gets measured gets fixed. In assessing your progress in business transformation we use the six capitals framework to measure how the organisation creates value over time. It uses a combination of quantitative and qualitative information monitoring the business’s activities and outputs in terms financial, manufactured, intellectual, human, social and relationship, and natural resources that you use or affect.

Economy

Your new business strategy is happening against the backdrop of post-pandemic change and a globalised economy (which is transitioning to a knowledge economy), and is continuously evolving as new technology appears. Individuals and groups are able to make use of any under-utilised assets that they own (such as cars, rooms and apartments) creating the sharing economy. Individuals can offer their services through online marketplaces on a full or part-time basis, and to companies both small and large, forming what is known as the “gig economy”. Companies are transitioning from being product oriented, to offering everything as a service. You can make use any of these options on the buy side or sell side, as part of your platform, or within your ecosystem.

Conclusion

Wherever each of your given categories of products or services sits within its own life-cycle and within the broader market, you can apply the business dimension of our Mutable framework to help you to think differently and create new value.

This Business framework can’t operate stand-alone but has to be supported by your leadership and People, as well as harnessing our Technology framework to provide the right tools.  You also need to keep an eye on the future possibilities (without neglecting current realities). The data you collect has the potential to become your biggest differentiator now, and over the next two to three years. Look at ways that you can unlock it and use it strategically to win.

In the Mutable Business™ framework an organisation maintains a permanent state of reinvention, so that it can survive today’s disruptive business landscape, by adapting its Business approach, its People and its Technology. The technology ingredients expand to the sectors of our Mutable Business™ – Technology framework.

Ultimately technology, digital business models, and a new data driven era of Software Defined Business and Big Software allows organisations to effectively virtualise their entire architecture, even create a Digital  Twin of the business. Once you have an idea you need money, people, production, and distribution. All of these are now being offered “as a service” through pay-on-demand platforms and ecosystems. This means that businesses can be scaled up and down very quickly and cost-effectively – and if your business model does not allow for this sort of adaptability and agility, it will not be able to compete, over time.

At the centre of our technology framework, your business is supported by the way your systems and technology Interface with the world – this includes your customers, suppliers, partners, people and the devices they use and interact with. You need to consider all of the channels you use to communicate with them, focus on the user experience, and understand what can be automated to do more with less or do it better.

In modernising and adapting your systems approach we believe you need to use Data as the starting point to interact with, gather and understand, so it can drive actions. You start here because the way that data is collected, stored, and used, along with the response times you will need for analysing it to give the answers and outcomes you are looking for will decide and inform the infrastructure choices you need to make.

The Infrastructure segment covers network, compute and storage and software can be used to define everything. Most organisations are on the journey to Cloud, but they are at different stages. Many still have to deal with legacy applications in Data Centres, often working alongside Public Cloud, and Private Cloud applications, with even the latest incarnation of enterprise servers (mainframe 3.0) as an option – we live in a Hybrid and Multicloud world. The mutable approach is all about choosing the right tool for each job in turn and running each workload on the most appropriate platform (remembering that this may change over time). 5th Generation Networks (5g), the Internet of Things (IoT) and Edge Computing are essential infrastructure enablers for a range of new business and technology developments, often termed Industry 4.0, that cover areas like autonomous vehicles, smart city grids, e-health, automated factories, mobile content streaming and data analytics. To support reinvention and adaptation, all of these need to be factored into your infrastructure plans.

The Action segment is where you make things happen, you provide insight, drive people to act, define your working process. You will use apps and Software as a Service. You should be thinking agile in your development approach, and using DevOps continuous integration/continuous delivery as a matter of course. Low-Code and No-Code platforms should be considered, and automation from machine learning to robotic process automation should form part of your strategy.

The foundation of all of this technology should provide Trust from identity to governance to security and resilience. Post pandemic, with the big shift towards home working, the traditional technology perimeter is dead, creating an ever-expanding attack surface for cybercrime. You have to be sure your approach is safe, secure, and assured that it will keep working, and deliver the quality levels that are needed.

Our mutable approach deploys Automation to augment and connect all of the segments of the technology framework. From AI to robotic process automation you need tools that combine natural language processing, knowledge representation, automated reasoning, and machine learning that work with and enhance the technology components you will deploy.

Finally, this Mutable Business™ – Technology framework can’t operate stand alone, but has to support your Business models and approach, as well as supporting and being supported by your People, their leadership and your organisation’s culture.

In the Mutable Business™ framework an organisation maintains a permanent state of reinvention, so that it can survive today’s disruptive business landscape by adapting its Business approach, its People and its Technology. Across the elements of your enterprise, the evidence and our research show that the organisations that can successfully combine all three in to innovation, by adopting Design Thinking, can adapt more effectively, and create more value.

But what it is Design Thinking and how can you adopt this mindset? Let’s start with a quote from the man who created the most valuable company in the world:

Most people make the mistake of thinking design is what it looks like. People think it’s this veneer – that the designers are handed this box and told, ‘Make it look good!’ That’s not what we think design is. It’s not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.

Steve Jobs

Roger Martin, author of the Design of Business said: “Design-thinking firms stand apart in their willingness to engage in the task of continuously redesigning their business… to create advances in both innovation and efficiency – the combination that produces the most powerful competitive edge.”

The Design Value Index

When design principles are applied to strategy and innovation the success rate for innovation dramatically improves. DMI and MotivStrategies, funded by Microsoft, began analysing the performance of US companies committed to design as an integral part of their business strategy. The Index tracked the value of 15 publicly held companies – Apple, Coca Cola, Ford, Herman-Miller, IBM, Intuit, Newell-Rubbermaid, Nike, Procter & Gamble, Starbucks, Starwood, Steelcase, Target, Walt Disney and Whirlpool. According to its 2014 study, they have outperformed the S&P 500 over the previous 10 years by an extraordinary 219%.

What is Design Thinking?

The topic has a history right back to the 60s and a lot of thinkers and contributors have been involved. In 1987 Peter Rowe of Harvard published Design Thinking; his book provided a systematic account of the process of designing in architecture and urban planning. In 1991 the design company IDEO was formed and showcased their design process, which drew heavily on the Stanford curriculum. They are widely accepted as one of the companies that brought Design Thinking to the mainstream. Then in 2005 Stanford’s d.school began teaching design thinking as a formal method. Take a look at IDEO’s Sir David Kelley in his excellent 2007 TED talk explaining that product design has become much less about the hardware and more about the user experience.

It is a user-centred approach to problem solving with these ingredients:

  • Human centred
  • Mindful of process
  • Show don’t tell
  • Bias towards action
  • Radical collaboration
  • Culture of prototyping

The classic flow of Design Thinking is to:

  • Empathise (search for rich stories, understand user needs)
  • Define (user need and insights – from their POV)
  • Ideate (ideas, ideas, ideas)
  • Prototype (build to learn)
  • Test (show, don’t tell)
  • Start all over and iterate the flow as much as possible

Empathise – Empathy is the foundation of a human-centred design process where you observe and engage with users and immerse yourself to uncover their needs. Look for issues they may or may not be aware of. Factor in diversity and inclusion, sustainability, and all stakeholder viewpoints. Think in terms of guiding innovation efforts and, most importantly, identify the right users to design for. Look to discover the emotions that guide their behaviours.

Define – The define mode is when you unpack and synthesize your empathy findings into compelling needs and insights and scope a specific and meaningful challenge. It’s critical to the design process because it explicitly expresses the problem you are striving to address through your efforts. Often, in order to be truly generative, you must first reframe the challenge based on new insights you have gained through your design work. Think of telling the story of the challenge from each stakeholder’s point of view.

Ideate – Ideate is the mode of your design process in which you aim to generate radical design alternatives. Mentally it represents a process of “going wide” in terms of concepts, outcomes and challenging current assumptions – it is a mode of “flaring” rather than “focus”. Step beyond obvious or easy solutions, work through misconceptions and try and harness collective perspectives. Uncover unexpected areas of exploration. Create fluency (volume) and flexibility (variety) in your innovation options. Get the obvious solutions out of your heads and think differently. This is where you can explore wild ideas or alternative stories, while trying to stay on topic.

Prototype – Prototyping is getting ideas and explorations out of your head and into the physical world. A prototype can be anything that takes a physical form – be it a wall of post-it notes, a role-playing activity, a space, an object, a model, an interface, or even a storyboard. You need to learn. Solve disagreements. Start a conversation. Fail quickly and cheaply watching the risk. But still manage the solution-building process.  Remember a prototype is not a finished product, it’s a stage in the design process.

Test – Testing is the chance to get feedback on your solutions, refine solutions to make them better, look for any preconceptions, and continue to learn about your users. Prototype as if you know you’re right, but test as if you know you’re wrong.  This is where critical thinking combines to enhance Design Thinking. You test for every possibility to refine your prototypes and solutions, to learn more about your user, with the goal of testing and refining your POV.

Back to the beginning – Start again. Iterate, and iterate again.  Iterate as much as time allows.

These five steps form a closed loop, continuous flow of design and thinking refinement.  They ensure you create and improve prototypes, but make sure you test early and test often.  The Design Thinking philosophy means you start and stay with an open mindset, applying critical thinking to challenge and test the solutions that are evolving as they cycle round the process.  At some point you move from the solution design phase to the solution implementation phase.  Recognise that your solution should save resources, but not implementing the solution may cost resources.  Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.  You should be delivering only what the user asks for and no more, a minimum viable product (MVP), then when implemented understand what users like or don’t like and build that into the next iteration of the product or service. Remember, Design Thinking is an integral part of being a Mutable Business.  Recognise that your products and services and all the procedures and processes used by your organisation should be evolving, should be in a permanent state of reinvention.  Continuous improvement is the goal.

In conclusion

You don’t have to be a designer to think like one. While learning to be a good designer takes years, you can think like a designer and design the way you lead, manage, and create. Design Thinking seeks to build ideas up, unlike critical thinking which breaks them down. Critical thinking has its place in assessing, testing, and looking for defects or improvements, but you need a balance of different thinking.  In your organisation design and creativity happen at the intersection of your people and the technology that they use. Add in the business component and those design ideas translate in to innovation. Design Thinking draws upon logic, imagination, intuition, and systemic reasoning, to explore possibilities of what could be, and to create desired outcomes that benefit the customer. It is a crucial ingredient in becoming a Mutable Business™.

In the Mutable Business™ framework an organisation maintains a permanent state of reinvention, so that it can survive today’s disruptive business landscape, by adapting its Business approach, its People and its Technology. The technology ingredients expand to the sectors of our Mutable Business™ – Technology framework.

Ultimately technology, digital business models, and a new data driven era of Software Defined Business and Big Software allows organisations to effectively virtualise their entire architecture, even create a Digital  Twin of the business. Once you have an idea you need money, people, production, and distribution. All of these are now being offered “as a service” through pay-on-demand platforms and ecosystems. This means that businesses can be scaled up and down very quickly and cost-effectively – and if your business model does not allow for this sort of adaptability and agility, it will not be able to compete, over time.

At the centre of our technology framework, your business is supported by the way your systems and technology Interface with the world – this includes your customers, suppliers, partners, people and the devices they use and interact with. You need to consider all of the channels you use to communicate with them, focus on the user experience, and understand what can be automated to do more with less or do it better.

In modernising and adapting your systems approach we believe you need to use Data as the starting point to interact with, gather and understand, so it can drive actions. You start here because the way that data is collected, stored, and used, along with the response times you will need for analysing it to give the answers and outcomes you are looking for will decide and inform the infrastructure choices you need to make.

The Infrastructure segment covers network, compute and storage and software can be used to define everything. Most organisations are on the journey to Cloud, but they are at different stages. Many still have to deal with legacy applications in Data Centres, often working alongside Public Cloud, and Private Cloud applications, with even the latest incarnation of enterprise servers (mainframe 3.0) as an option – we live in a Hybrid and Multicloud world. The mutable approach is all about choosing the right tool for each job in turn and running each workload on the most appropriate platform (remembering that this may change over time). 5th Generation Networks (5g), the Internet of Things (IoT) and Edge Computing are essential infrastructure enablers for a range of new business and technology developments, often termed Industry 4.0, that cover areas like autonomous vehicles, smart city grids, e-health, automated factories, mobile content streaming and data analytics. To support reinvention and adaptation, all of these need to be factored into your infrastructure plans.

The Action segment is where you make things happen, you provide insight, drive people to act, define your working process. You will use apps and Software as a Service. You should be thinking agile in your development approach, and using DevOps continuous integration/continuous delivery as a matter of course. Low-Code and No-Code platforms should be considered, and automation from machine learning to robotic process automation should form part of your strategy.

The foundation of all of this technology should provide Trust from identity to governance to security and resilience. Post pandemic, with the big shift towards home working, the traditional technology perimeter is dead, creating an ever-expanding attack surface for cybercrime. You have to be sure your approach is safe, secure, and assured that it will keep working, and deliver the quality levels that are needed.

Our mutable approach deploys Automation to augment and connect all of the segments of the technology framework. From AI to robotic process automation you need tools that combine natural language processing, knowledge representation, automated reasoning, and machine learning that work with and enhance the technology components you will deploy.

Finally, this Mutable Business™ – Technology framework can’t operate stand alone, but has to support your Business models and approach, as well as supporting and being supported by your People, their leadership and your organisation’s culture.

Why Stakeholders? Why think differently? If you’ve worked for a “business as usual” organisation, you may well have heard these statements:

  • The customer is king
  • It’s all about shareholder value
  • Our people are our greatest asset

For a Mutable Business™ none of those statements are fit for purpose, although they each contain an important degree of truth. How do you reconcile them, and what else should you be considering? Mutable Business™ thinkers agree with Jack Welch, the CEO of GE when, in 2009, he famously declared that concentrating on shareholder value is “the dumbest idea in the world.” We also agree with Marc Benioff, Chairman and CEO of Salesforce when he suggested in a Huffington Post article that this still-pervasive business theory is “wrong. The business of business isn’t just about creating profits for shareholders – it’s also about improving the state of the world and driving stakeholder value.”

A business strategy with too much emphasis on quarterly financial performance and earnings per share will fail in today’s business landscape with today’s workforce. We can pull out other quotes from Jack Ma of Alibaba, Xavier Huillard Vinci Group, Paul Polman of Unilever, John Mackey of Whole Foods. We should have been thinking this way for a long time. 40 years ago, Alvin Toffler, in his book The Third Wave, told us that the corporation “requires attention to multiple bottom lines – social, environmental, informational, political and ethical – all of them interconnected.”  John Elkington coined the term Triple Bottom Line (TBL) back in the 90s. By that he was explaining investment and business decisions in terms of People, Planet and Profit.

Stakeholders

We need to think beyond shareholders to include all of our Stakeholders. Who are they? Our definition of a Stakeholder includes any entity, role or person who can have an impact on your organisation’s performance. So as well as shareholders and investors, that obviously includes customers, suppliers, business partners as well as the advisors they work with, but also the markets you operate in, the regulators of those markets, the media organisations and influencers that you interact with, and all of the associated communities that your organisation and its people touch. Add in the governments of the countries and territories that your organisation operates in, and that is a big and diverse set of audiences and individuals to engage with. Each can have an impact on your business. Your actions and your attitude towards each of them will make them react positively or negatively. How you communicate with them will make the difference.

A new kind of Engagement

We need a new kind of engagement that isn’t based on press releases, investor briefings, annual meetings and good words in the annual report. We need a new kind of approach to engagement and communications – a Mutable approach that embraces continuous reinvention, allowing you to communicate clearly and activate the right people at the right time.

What is the Stakeholder’s Attitude?

2x2 influence advocacy diagram

Every different Stakeholder needs to be assessed and included in your engagement strategies, tactics and policies. Think of each one in terms of a 2×2 matrix with the axes of Influence and Advocacy (see diagram). Those with high influence and low advocacy of your organisation are your Opponents. Those with low Influence and high Advocacy are your Friends. Of course, there are the Neutrals too with low Influence and Advocacy. Those with high Influence and high Advocacy in the top right box are your Champions, and you need to encourage and support them. Opponents, Neutrals, and Friends – actually you need a continuous approach to address all of them as groups and individually with the objective of turning them all into your Champions.

Your Actions

Everything is connected, but engagement starts with how you go about your business. From how you design your products and services to how you handle customer complaints – all of your processes and actions can be swiftly under the microscope in today’s world of instant communications and social media. From how you hire your staff, to how you develop them, treat them and trust them. Your shared values as an organisation are crucial. Your approach should be more diverse, inclusive, equal, sustainable, and meaningful. Your own “business as usual” should be based on the characteristics of:

  • Accountability
  • Excellence
  • Integrity
  • Transparency
  • Collaboration
  • Timeliness

Your Impact

Your actions always have an impact. Will it be positive or negative? What you do as a business touches nature, people and society. In today’s hyper-connected world, you need to behave as if everything you say and do internally might become public. Think about how the “what” and “how” of what you do impacts:

  • Improving the state of the World
  • Sustainability
  • The environment
  • Your community
  • Your marketplace
  • Your reputation

A Mutable Business™ needs to consider all of these impacts and possibilities in the continual process of planning, design, and execution of its purpose, mission and goals, as well as crisis management or what happens when things go wrong. The global changes we have lived through since 2020 highlights the importance of sustainability in particular. It’s good for the planet, it’s good for business, and it needs to be integrated in to your thinking every step of the way.  In today’s complex world small things can cause massive outcomes. There are so many variables. You can’t plan, but you can be prepared. The Mutable Business™ can’t expect the unexpected, but it must have robust processes in place to react when needed.

Communications

Push, Pull, interactive graphic

For this new kind of engagement, your business needs to communicate with each and all of their Stakeholders in different ways at different times, embracing the new communication and collaboration paradigms of today. A combination of Push, Pull, and Interactive communications are an integral part of any modern, digital communication strategy.

Push is a broadcast. It refers to any message sent from a sender to a receiver, either individually or as a mass mailer, a message on a bulletin board, a notice on a website, even an SMS message to alert the stakeholder of an issue. It could be messages published on old media too. The sender is in control, determining who receives the communication, how they receive it, and when.

Pull is self-service communication. A stakeholder, employee, customer, partner, analyst, or community member accesses information on their own terms. It could be online documentation, an FAQ, a library of press releases, news bulletins, an intranet, a wiki, a portal or a mobile app. Pull communications enable open and convenient access to information and other resources. Pull communication is usually informational and generally not time sensitive.

Interactive communication is two-way and real time or near real-time. It is a conversation between parties. It could be intelligence about a problem or a solution. It could be physical – a chat by the water-cooler, or virtual – an email exchange, a Zoom meeting or a tweet chat. It could be a team meeting, a town hall discussion or an online brainstorming session. It could be an event, or a business meeting. It gives stakeholders a voice. It is often the best way to convey sensitive information, so there can be feedback and dialogue.

The Mutable Business™ needs a balanced approach that combines all three. Each Stakeholder needs to be assessed so that we know if they are opponent, friend, neutral or champion. The communication strategy needs to be tailored accordingly, although it’s important to remember the Cluetrain maxim that “all markets are conversations”. Interesting or time-sensitive information will almost certainly need to be pushed, but employees, partners, consumers, and community members need to be engaged with a mix of all three, so that you find a balance.

The business case for Stakeholder Engagement

Engagement done well is like a savings account. The value accumulates to your organisation over time, and acts as a cushion in times of reputational or financial distress. Companies that are more aware of all stakeholder interests are more likely to avoid crises because they are better able to anticipate opportunities and risks. Studies on the impacts of good stakeholder and community relations across different industry sectors and countries conclude that organisations that intentionally build stakeholder trust are more financially resilient over time across multiple indicators of value. This is what makes Stakeholder Engagement within and without  the organisation a vital dimension of the progress towards Mutable Business™.

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