Tools for Systemic Venture Building

Give ordinary people the right tools, and they will design and build the most extraordinary things. — Neil Gershenfeld.

Metabolic Ventures receives quite some questions from people and organizations asking about the most useful tools they can use to ground their thinking in systemic venture building. While we won’t go through a full list, we wanted to publish a series that highlights a few tools and approaches that we have found to be particularly useful.

Systemic venture building has multiple phases that are typically important to do in sequence. Roughly speaking, those are:

1) Problem Understanding => 2) Solution Design => 3) Organization Design

The tools we’ll discuss in this series are mostly relevant for the middle component — solution design — but also stretch across elements of both problem understanding and organization design. Once they have found a problem they want to focus on, ventures still need to do a huge amount of orientation around that system, problem, and landscape to understand their place within it. Without a good foundation, ventures can swim around aimlessly for quite some time.

What ventures really need in the early stages is velocity, which is defined by a combination of speed + direction. Speed by itself can mean the venture is moving quickly but everywhere and nowhere — leading to a very low velocity even though they’re moving quickly. This situation where ventures have speed without direction is actually quite common, even when methods like lean approaches are utilized.

To really get a sense of direction in a complex system, ventures need to answer some critical questions:

• How does the system need to change to achieve the future being sought and envisioned?
• What should the venture’s role be in driving that change?
• How do we make sure that we don’t repeat previous mistakes others have already made?
• How do we make sure we get the timing of our proposition right?
• Who should we be working with?
• What are our future plans and how are we going evolve over time as the system changes?

In general, the tools we will write about in this series should get ventures to the point where they have a solid grip on the system. They help set and clarify the direction of a venture, including what it’s trying to achieve, why it’s trying to achieve it, and how it intends to achieve it.

Tools in the series

Theory of Change
A theory of change is a theory, made explicit, about how the system needs to change and how an organization’s actions are presumed to lead to or unlock key parts of that transformation. We’ll walk through the intricacies of a theory of change, explore different levels and uses, and provide guiding questions for making a first go at creating one.

Role Typologies
Like superheroes working as a team to solve a problem, different roles are needed to transform a system. But the roles which are needed are likely to differ between different systems, challenges, and objectives. Understanding these roles and what it takes to fully embody them can help put a venture on solid footing and provide a clear identity vis-a-vis other actors. We’ll go through different roles we see that ventures could embody, how to lean into both internal capabilities and what the system needs, and how to think about combining roles and prioritizing different roles over time.

Idea Maze
Balaji Srinivasan coined the concept of the idea maze. How to arrive at a good startup idea means not only having a clear vision of where you want the company and product to go but also understanding the landscape so well that you can think through every facet of the company in the future and how it will evolve based on the evolving system around you. The key questions for a system-changing venture is what critical role it will play in the system, how the system can shift over time, how that role could or should adapt over time, and thus how the venture may adapt. The treasure at the end is the change it seeks. We map out how a system-changing venture can go about this process.

Metabolic Ventures has the mission to empower the entrepreneurial ecosystem to drive system change toward a sustainable and fair society. To learn more about Metabolic Ventures and the Metabolic Ecosystem, visit our website.