Future markets, resilience and agile organizations

In a market subject to increasing threats and where people have already changed their behaviour towards a hybrid continuity, how should companies change to face impending risks?

The recent pandemic has revealed all the fragility laying underneath our systems. We have discussed at length how our patterns of behaviour have changed in recent months to allow us to find useful strategies to overcome risk and continue to perform our daily chores with satisfaction. In the end, we realized that hybrid behaviours were the ones that allowed us greater freedom.

The Hybrid Continuum is defined by experiences to be lived in a fluid, and transparent way in a hybrid environment made partly in digital contexts and partly in physical contexts. It is people who freely choose how and in which contexts to live their experiences along a hybrid continuum between physical and digital.

In the long run, we would have reached the Hybrid Continuum anyway. The signals were there: maybe we would have gotten there in 10 years, or 20. But you know, sometimes evolution goes on leaps and bounds and not through a slow maturation of events and individuals and so, a virus and less than a year after its first appearance, we are here trying to understand how we have changed.

As people, we have intuited a little, what remains is to understand how companies are changing and how they have reacted to the devastating impact of an entire market that has closed bang, almost without warning. We used to think that the leaner companies, the more technological, those less tied to physical contexts would be the readiest to react, and even those that would suffer the least. But that wasn’t the case. Surprisingly, the larger companies, the more complex ones, the ones that could count on different market accesses, responded better.

A new dimension of business risk

Today having your business entirely on the physical or on the digital has perhaps become the primary business risk. On the material, we understand that there are conditions — as it was for COVID or in the case of the increasingly likely extreme environmental events that put the survival of the business at risk. The risk is high even if we talk about digital contexts: all those involved in Cybersecurity fear that sooner or later the network may be blocked by some threat. Each of these contexts is fragile, in its way, and therefore dangerous.

The solution is to go towards a hypothetical 50/50 by calibrating the access to our services in the physical world and the digital world, knowing that one of the two areas could grow up to occupy the entire spectrum of a company.

We have therefore understood that, in a Hybrid Continuum context, companies must modulate their offer on a dynamic balance and compensation between physical and digital or hybrid systems (automated physical contexts) to distribute the risk and be, with a word now abused, resilient.

Resilience is the inherent ability of a system to change its operation before, during and after a change or disruption, so that it can continue the necessary operations under both expected and unforeseen conditions.

The Future of Go to Market in the Hybrid Continuum

People expect, and will increasingly do so, to be able to do their chores either in totally physical contexts or in digital contexts or a hybrid continuity between the two. But these new behaviours have profound implications for the way companies bring their offerings to market.

The hybrid continuity brings further complexity. For a company, it does not mean being present in the physical, in the digital, or a little bit in a world and the other. The most important thing is the balance within these systems.

To go to market with a product or a service, and to do it successfully, no longer means to have the ability to invest the most suitable market with an offer appropriate to that context. Still, it also means that the operations, the service model, the go-to-market strategies must be able to serve in an equivalent and transparent way all these contexts in a balanced way. So that if an exogenous factor affects one of the parties, the others can compensate.

As they change, therefore, the enterprises adjust their priorities. And to understand how these last ones change, it is necessary first to understand the planning principles that guide the way the products and the services are conceived in the hybrid continuity:

• Complete redundancy between the physical and digital worlds. People must be able to do the same things in one context or another. Every single feature must, therefore, be present in every context.
• Total transparency between the two worlds. People can move from one context to the other without interruption and any loss of value.
• Total inclusion. All people, even those with disabilities or limited literacy, must be able to benefit from these new services, processes and systems whatever their technological competence or capacity in both worlds.

Designing products and services in this way requires significant investment. But how much would it cost to take the risk? What would be the losses if another catastrophe struck the physical world or the network?

Product Management and Hybrid Continuum

In this emerging new context, the concepts of value and risk for companies take on a new light, and this also changes the priorities with which we develop products and services.

Product managers and product owners who lead development teams are now faced with significant paradoxes that must be taken into account if we want to protect company-side value.

Dilemma 1: Priority to value in context vs symmetry
In the Agile philosophy, priorities are defined according to the value you are able to release. According to this approach, if you operate in different contexts — digital or physical, to be precise — you should prioritize the most valuable features in one context or another. So, to make it simple, a service enjoyed in a digital environment could be different from the same use in physical contexts.

In the Hybrid Continuum this cannot happen. Same features and functionality in every context in every medium. A devastating complexity to manage, but people expect to live this kind of experiences. This means that from now on, it is necessary to synchronize product developments on the various channels so that they can be released simultaneously.

Dilemma 2: Value for the user vs robustness
The level of risk that we have known and that unfortunately still surpasses us puts the product management in front of a choice. How are development priorities defined? What for the value for the user? This may conflict with matters such as robustness or security.

Now the ability to be robust and resilient in the face of threats has become the number one priority in the eyes of management.

Dilemma 3: Lean vs antifragility
To re-launch products and services in a streamlined way means to rely on re-launching an MVP to understand the potential of the offer and the market response, but when you have to release a Minimum Marketable Product should you consider the plurality of contexts we discussed in the lines above? And also add the fragility of the system to the product values?

How do you balance the speed of lean approaches with the new business risk?

What emerges is the necessity, also in the field of product management, of a change of perspective. If lean and agile philosophies emphasize the concept of resilience, perhaps it is time to go a little further and move towards antifragility.

Antifragility is beyond resilience or robustness. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better. -Nassim Nicholas Taleb

In the logic of Business Agility, you have to have a lean-approach. Still, now it’s not enough, you have to look for an antifragile approach, which is continuously improving — in this, responding fully to the values of the Agile Manifesto.

Responding to change rather than following a plan.