Much of business today is caught up in managing short-term change that is growing in complexity and challenges.

So the challenges in the past year have been highly focused on supply chain disruptions, plugging gaps in technology solutions that can provide a higher flexible, agile, and advanced planning and production environment and continue to keep moving towards securing a more sustainable future that reflects the need to become carbon neutral, net zero.

Yet disruption is increasing; we are in a volatile world of constant change.

Today’s systems are highly stretched and have been designed and built for a steady, repeating business, the era of yesterday. Flexibility, agility, and adaptability have yet to be addressed sufficiently in design or mind shifts for our present and future operations to provide a different, more agile operating environment. Consistently has been the norm, whereas today it reacts to constant change coming from multiple, often unpredictable situations.

We need to change how we operate.

We need to collaborate in more open and shared ways.

My view is that we need to hurry towards Ecosystems in Organization design. There is a pressing need to widen our partnerships and invest in a more open, trusting environment to share knowledge, reciprocate and be more collaborative.

We must seek out and connect with multiple and unfamiliar partners to strengthen the shared ecosystem. Organizations become more robust by the strength of their ecosystem, in suppliers, collaborators, partners, and customers to build a growing reliance, trust, and level of higher co-creation together, to resolve a more volatile set of complexities and challenges we are all facing in this world at present.

We need to combine internal and external resources with different approaches to innovation or business adaption to achieve an ever-growing appropriate mix of skills, performance, and experiences to meet the complexity and challenges we all will need to face.

Today we need to think differently, resisting the urge to overemphasize the internal organization to find equitable ways to manage shared ecosystems.

We have a significantly narrow path to managing complex challenges.

We not only need to manage the three immediate challenges of supply chain disruptions, changing technology infrastructure, and building resîliency and sustainability into the business that has been increasing the priority focus within a business to offset disruption through a different approach to resilience.

We also have a set of challenges ahead of us that are bigger and more complex and add to this volatility. We need to change how we manage our own operations and the changing need for a different organizational design approach to collaborations, co-creation, and cooperation.

Here are NINE business needs that are as volatile to adapt and tackle in new, ecosystem-responsive ways. We need to learn to collaborate and co-create together.

1. Markets are shifting– some global markets will protect and defend, discourage open trade and increase protection.
2. Consumer demographics are changing. Disposable income is rapidly changing in a more inflationary and weakening group of economies, we are facing aging populations in the West and significant parts of Asia, and that is impacting in what is offered or required.
3. Regulations continue to change. The growing call for greater harmonization is met by fierce “pushback” from different communities. Manage this uncertainty of different regulations is hindering progress or restricting organizations
4. Diversity and inclusion are becoming more sensitive worldwide and have political and societal challenges that often constrain and restrict. Freedom of movement is being challenged as regulation is imposed to deal with new and sudden crises.
5. Tariffs and trading barriers seem to be getting more of the political stick and are shaped more by political views shaping what is appropriate or needed.
6. Capital raising has entered a very different time. After the considerable easing of the money supply, we are entering a tighter one where interest levels seem to be rising, fueling inflation and building further risk into investment. Inflation is growing as a top issue to manage in the foreseeable future.
7. Volatile economies have implications socially, economically, and politically and the ability to ‘read and react’ gives the need to be highly dependent on partners and a global network to collaborate and cooperate to minimize these disturbances.
8. The Energy Transition and Global Warming is a massive challenge in the complexity of achieving the level of change within the next 30 years. It will bring extremes in weather, disasters, shortages, and famine; how we respond needs to be far more coordinated and orchestrated.
9. Finally, we are facing in many unexpected ways the VOCA period– full of Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity.

I do not believe we can manage alone; Our common challenges are connecting to resolve growing complexity mutually,

Our futures are very connected; we recognize the high levels of dependency. We need to change how we manage ourselves. We must not draw back and “look in”; we must reach out. The world needs to collaborate, co-create and cooperate more than ever.

We live in an ecosystem of mutual dependencies and potential new sources of mutual value. We must recognize the value of designing and thinking in ecosystems in how we set about business and managing globally and between organizations or dedicated units within each who can quickly “talk the same language” and resolve or find new options.

The more we understand ecosystem thinking and design, the more we can shape and respond more effectively in a changing world.

Linear thinking, being singly performance-driven in individuals, organizations, or society, is not a sustainable future. We live in a finite world of space, resources, and the need to value and respect nature; ignore this we lose our ONLY ecosystem, our world.

Ecosystem thinking and design provide a pathway out of the existing constraints of the past ways we undertook business; it can unlock much. More importantly, it can advance and provide increasing value and options that fit more towards the changing world and its different realities. The priority is to identify all the needs to design a new operating approach and evaluate the constraints, risks, and different resourcing needs.

Ecosystem thinking needs to be the new norm in how we think and design, with innovation and ingenuity needing to be central to this. We need three degrees of connectivity, interactivity, and sharing for Ecosystem design

Have you built enough of an understanding of what Ecosystem design means in change, in different business models, shared IP, higher levels of dependence, and building a new level of trust and collaboration?

The time is that you should understand the value of Ecosystem thinking and design- I can certainly help.

*First published in November 2022, slightly amended here