Only Dead Fish

Aligned Autonomy

In my transformation work I often end up advocating for the role that greater autonomy can have in helping (large) businesses to move faster and be more manoeuvrable. This is particularly true in the context of small, multidisciplinary teams that can act as the engine for real change. If those teams are going to iterate properly, and have the kind of working culture and practices that enable them to move fast and be truly adaptive, higher levels of autonomy removes unnecessary hierarchy and enables speed of decision-making within the areas that they have responsibility for. 

The common challenge to this is often focused around governance and alignment. This becomes especially important when you have multiple small teams working in this way. If you have a number of teams iterating rapidly how do you ensure that they are working on stuff that matters to the business? How do make sure that they are all heading in the right direction and working to the kind of standards that facilitates a fast-and-roughly-right mindset but doesn't compromise on the areas where the business cannot fail?

The best framing for this that I've used is Spotify's concept of 'aligned autonomy' which seeks to strike the right balance between high levels of autonomy and flexibility, and the need to marshall progress to make it all go in the same direction. It's captured in this clip, taken from Spotify's renowned films that describe their engineering culture:

Spotify famously structure their teams into Squads, Chapters and Tribes, a resourcing idea that is gaining much greater traction now as a way of bringing organisational adaptiveness to life through the way in which you structure your capability (for a case study of a scaled version of this, check out this write up of ING Bank).

Jeff Bezos once talked about how Amazon is 'stubborn on vision' but also 'flexible on details'. You still need that common direction and strong alignment, but you also need the flexibility and autonomy to move fast. Bringing those things together is the secret of success. Alignment enables autonomy.

Post of the Month - January 2018 - The Winner

Thanks everyone for taking part in the vote. Our winner this month is John Battelle's post on how Facebook Can't be Fixed. John duly joins the hall of fame. Next month's vote will be early in March. 

Post of the Month - January 2018 - The Vote

Thanks for the nominations. So this month's vote is between:

The year ahead for strategy: we've got a fight on our hands by Alex Hesz

Strength in Weakness by Simon Thomas

Why funny women should take the lead in advertising this year from Vicky Maguire

Facebook Can't Be Fixed by John Battelle

TV, retail, advertising and cascading collapses by Ben Evans

And you can vote below:

Post of the Month - January 2018 - Nominations

It's time for nominations for Post of the Month. So if there is a post that you've read over the past month that resonated with you please do nominate it via the comments below or direct. As soon as I have a good selection I'll stick them up for a vote but as always I have a few starters:

The year ahead for strategy: we've got a fight on our hands by Alex Hesz

Strength in Weakness by Simon Thomas

Why funny women should take the lead in advertising this year from Vicky Maguire

Please do add to these with your own nominations. 

Where WeChat Goes, Facebook Follows

I've been in Hong Kong on client work all this week so of-course have talked a lot about WeChat, which I've been featuring in my trends work for a few years now. The number of monthly active users of WeChat is now approaching a Billion, and yet it launched as recently as 2011. An amazing rate of growth by any standards (even Facebook) but what is perhaps most interesting about WeChat of-course is the scale and scope of interaction that it enables (which you get some sense of from the video above).

I talk a lot about the 'gateway principle' or the idea that if you can be the place where people go to solve a problem, fulfill a need of some kind or get an answer for something, then you are the primary beneficiary of the transaction or interaction data. Many services and businesses have found themselves disintermediated by unexpected players. Many markets have succumbed to new intermediaries that facilitate the relationship between the end user and the service provider but in the process secure significant value through the data that they collect on specific users. The more of the customer journey that you own or you facilitate, the more data you get and the more value you can derive. That's why GAFA expand up and down the stack to encompass hardware, software, operating systems, payments and transactions, access and search, communication and messaging. That's why GAFA are woven into the fabric of the web (a phrase originally coined by Emily Bell) rather than just relying on destination domains or owned media assets. It's a key mindset shift that traditional businesses need to get their heads around and it's been happening for years. 

What's most interesting about WeChat though, is the degree to which entire customer journeys can happen on the platform with multiple sides of many different markets combining in one place. It's the very definition of a platform business. For all their progress, expansion and ambitions Facebook in particular must be coveting the way that WeChat have capitalised on a social graph to turn it into something far bigger and broader than just advertising.