There is a growing body of work about “orchestration” and its need in the business world. As we form a greater association with ecosystems as the business design, the orchestrator becomes central to its performance and success.

Orchestration has become synonymous with managing or dealing with (specifically) external partners. The need is to learn to cooperate to produce something different and original, usually in a platform and ecosystem arrangement.

I am continually reading about scale, modular structures, governance, the advantage of asset-light business models where the possibilities of speed and breadth of open innovation need to “kick in.” Orchestration can take on a lot, but we need to define the role a little more, in my opinion.

I often wonder if all this orchestration through ecosystem design does achieve that radical breakthrough or have become just another solution or coordinating mechanism and a convenient “tag” to attach to it to consider?

I wrote an article on “defining ecosystems in industry, ” which will have some additional context here.

For me: Ecosystem design is about being open in all potentially valuable proposals and co-creation possibilities and finding the opportunities to engage openly in collaborative forums you can trust and execute your thinking and needs. You look to connect and collaborate as broadly as you can. It is seeking out diversity, experience, and new insights you not only can grow and build out further, along with those within the community grow with you in this partnership towards a better value and impact.

Here I want to discuss the orchestrator’s role specifically.

The orchestrator needs to shape our operating environment.

As business becomes more unpredictable, we do need to attempt to shape or reshape our operating environment. We are more in need of alignment than ever. As we lock into collaborations, we need to understand the required partners’ roles, activities (skills, solutions, technologies, etc.) to bring additional value to the top of what one organization might have.

The growing difference, actually one of the hardest things to do, is for the organization to orchestrate to let go. What does it give up in control or value to enable a greater sharing of the improved importance of building this design ecosystem? Does it achieve a faster scaling, a more flexible, adaptive environment that partnering offers?

Mostly it does the very opposite unless it has a purposeful design. It needs building governance, protecting positions, managing intellectual property for accommodating different organizational operating systems or viewpoints of “their” narrow value objectives. Orchestration needs to accomplish these and much more.

So many organizations have built out their internal capabilities for handling the launch, scale, and design of their view of “going to market”. It becomes such a tough challenge to understand and accommodate many different approaches or processes. As we still lack a common understanding of innovation, operations, structures, and the number of dedicated resources and where these fit within the one organization, how can we align these?

Orchestration needs to pull everything together.

Each time I view that visual above, I can imagine the first practice of a set of musicians all coming together for the first time and producing a cacophony that has no harmony. The job of the conductor is to break this down and build the parts into a collective whole. That, for me, is the orchestration role in any business ecosystem or managing within a platform.

The whole needs a clear orchestrating of behaviours and discipline. Each musician knows his instrument or, hopefully, so and needs to understand and interpret the score. It is for the conductor to give his rendition on how it should come together and be managed.

A great conductor can unite and provide the strategic direction and interpretation and guide the orchestrator or business partners to bring what they have as individuals into a collective harmony. That takes hard work and everyone’s commitment and identification of what they want to achieve.

In business, we call this orchestrating network behaviour. In search of the optimum balancing levels of autonomy with bridging these individual skills. To get to this point, the orchestrator needs high trust and mutual understanding to be powerfully prevalent. The result is to form tighter structures and keep as much of the individual, perhaps unstructured aspects, to give individual freedom and creative opportunity. It often explores open interpretation that turns a musical piece from being average or satisfactory into a brilliant rendition. In orchestrating an ecosystem of partners, you are looking for individual expression and collective awareness.

So, the orchestrator needs to pull out the network effect, to seek out creative spaces, those individual moments, but then pull them together in a co-creative way. The linking and communicating of these produce the combined sound or difference that profoundly influences innovation.

The orchestrator needs to conduct and bring out the best performance.

Being the orchestrator of any ecosystem design in business requires a clear understanding of all the parts. To ask anyone to step up and conduct is not an option; it is a disaster. The person who can genuinely orchestrate brings out the real underlying value of the parts to produce the innovation performance needed. The power of the ecosystem is in its orchestration and design.

It is the interpretation by being the primary party. The orchestrator provides the pace and tempo, they build and create the dynamics, and they are the ones that do articulate the vision, mission, and objectives.

The orchestrator needs to understand what the ecosystem is attempting to do clearly; the orchestrator needs to lead in the design and interpretation of the vision. There is so much in the dynamics of ecosystems that do need managing the beat and tempo.

**An earlier article, “The Orchestration Role in Any Business Ecosystem Design“, has been shortened here, with small modifications