Both individuals and businesses compete for survival to thrive in a VUCA World. Being fit for purpose has two dimensions. Looking inside for  capability and potential to keep pace in the face of rapid changes from the outside environment and take risks to learn and grow new skills to react quickly. Also, to look externally for pressures to adapt and coevolve with allies or competitors and changes in the environment.

The leader’s attention needs to be on the inability of the organization and its people to find the energy and attention needed to absorb new information from the environment. This requires full engagement in innovation by learning self-organisation practices and coevolving new relationships. Not every issue can be tackled at once. Millions of interactions and conversations cannot be managed, so leaders must identify some key intervention points to maintain clarity and coherence in the interactions.  

 Self-Organisation

It will be necessary to identify a subsystem or core problem to focus on, and tease out, the patterns of connections with other systems and their environments. Some of these patterns will be:

• Sources of momentum coming from the top-down, bottom-up, outside-in and inside-out and patterns of interaction

• The methods and networks used to gather information and process feedback.

• Techniques and practice used to learn, align choices and assess their mpact.

• The rules for engaging colleagues, partners, customers, etc., in coordinated action.

The main feature of self-organisation is that, when enabled, it can help to regenerate the organization by renewing its functions and replacing or retraining the people to replenish spent resources. This draws energy and expertise into the organization while maintaining its identity. This can generate the need to reorganise, resulting in new patterns of interaction needed to evolve and sustain itself in a new context.

Fitness Landscape

The leadership team have the task of positioning the business in a changing marketplace. Regenerative Leaders us the complexity model of a “fitness landscape” to model the capabilities of competitors in a multi-dimensional space at one point in time. It’s a form of benchmarking that compares traits in a product, speed of distribution, product reliability and customer value. There might be a rating for innovation, customer loyalty, human resources, etc. When graphed the results look like a landscape with peaks and valleys. The very competitive appear at the peaks and those in trouble are located in the valleys.

The major supermarkets operate as self-organising systems and have developed patterns of interlocking behaviour. They have developed powerful couplings to keep each other at the “peaks” of fitness. This enables them to respond quickly and intelligently to a change generated by another. This synchronisation isn’t overtly managed. It’s a form of “structural coupling”, like a well-practised couple dancing in harmony without much conscious thought. This coupling is mutually beneficial to the supermarkets so they can sustain themselves in their market and keep their smaller competitors in the “valleys”.

Possibility Space

Possible actions are limited by the unpredictable nature of interactions and processes in self-organising systems. Consequently, the range of possible actions to feed innovation are limited to maintain stability. In a rapidly changing context there is a risk from not exploring the space of possibilities needed to match changes in the environment and respond quickly.