Collected Works in Organisational Design & Transformation
Anthologic’s tag-line is “collected works in organisational design and transformation”. At the heart of what we do is find patterns in how organisations approach organisational design and change. We look at not only the intended approach but also how these play out against the incentives, politics, and economics of an organisation.
Our level of analysis is “collected works” not only so that we can replicate approaches across different organisations but also so we can avoid replication where this would erode competitive advantage. If we look at a pattern that occurs across a number of organisations we might determine one of three courses of action:
- We might replicate it – and therefore reduce the effort we spend trying to re-design our approach
- We might avoid it – because we know that taking the same approach that other organisations take in this area may reduce a key source of competitive advantage we have (we need to go to first principles to determine if this is the case)
- We might analyse it for common gaps and counter-patterns – we might see an opportunity where there are enough organisations taking a similar approach that the issues with that approach – and gaps it leaves open, or the complimentary capabilities it requires to succeed – are sufficiently numerous to create a market
When working with “collected works” that analyse related patterns across different organisations there is an important distinction between what is actually common versus how the organisation describes what they are doing. This is where “narrative” becomes important.
You can imagine scenarios where two organisations are doing the same thing but they each describe it differently. The “narrative” itself can therefore impact the effectiveness of a common pattern. It’s not just what you’re doing that counts, but the story you create around it.
Narrative connects even common, commoditised capabilities with the other parts of your organisation. So at Anthologic we analyse both “collected works” and “narrative”. This is the right level of analysis to understand how you differentiate with business capabilities that are unique to your business model, and with commodity business capabilities you acquire from the market.
Collected works and narrative enhance organisational value using story-telling as the connective tissue between business capabilities and competitive advantage