Thread by @swardley

X : Is my company more of a pioneer, settler or town planner?
Me : Hmmm. Tricky. I have mixed feelings on this. Let me explain why. I'm going to start with an old map of Fotango ...

... let me add a cell based structures and mix in attitude i.e. pioneer [A], settler [B] and town planner [C] ...

... now what I can do is added up all the people in the teams across all the maps and determine their frequency.
X : Aha, the company is more town planning?
Me : The problem is ... is that useful?

... from a HR planning perspective it might help but the profile that you make is influenced by industry, semantics and also by the choices you wish to make. For example, I can take a map and apply common economic patterns to find out where I might want to attack ...

... just focused on those areas to attack then I could be a cloud service [A] focused on volume operations (one type of attitude) or I could focus on something novel and new [B] requiring a different attitude or I could do both ...

... so what you need varies with the map and the profile is a combination of many components, many areas of current focus and where you wish to focus. Unless you're very small then describing a company as "one thing" just seems ... messy ... but there's another problem ...

... semantics. Since most companies don't seem to understand the model of evolution we tend to describe everything different as an innovation from the innovation of something new (genesis) to the innovation of a product feature to the innovation of a utility service ...

... if you change the map to reflect this on the x-axis then what you get is "everything is an innovation" i.e. I'm "pioneering" for doing either [A] or [B] or both.

In fact, the entire map breaks down at this point because there is nothing to represent movement because the space has no meaning on the map .... you might as well just draw a value chain.

So, I'm pretty ambivalent to the description of companies as Pioneers, Settlers or Town Planners. You can sort of say they're more of this or that but they're usually a mix of all and that mix can be dynamic depending upon where they need to focus ...

... of course, PST owes a debt to "Accidental Empires" and the idea of companies as commandos, infantry and police. I do get this, I'm just not convinced by describing a company in such broad terms and tend to use the relative i.e. we need more of this rather than we are this.

X : By definition everything different is an innovation.
Me : Yes, in one sense. But they are also different things i.e. the "innovation' of something genuinely novel is very different from the "innovation" of turning a product into a utility model.

X : How?
Me : In the "innovation" of a utility then you have a reference model (the product) to build around, you know what the user need is and the focus is on volume operations. In the "innovation" of genesis you don't know what you're building, what the need really is etc.

... if you want to use an exploration metaphor then the "innovation" of product to utility is like "find a faster way to transport goods from the US to UK".

In the "innovation" of genesis, it's more like "find a new country" i.e. set off in a direction no-one has gone and hope.

One of the things that annoys me is people say "Town Planners don't innovate" . Of course they do, all the time. It's just different from what Pioneers do.

If you took power for example, then Town Planners are constantly trying to find better ways of providing this ... but ...

... if a pioneer was running your nuclear power plant, you'd wake up one day to find the city has no power because the pioneer is trying to turn the plant into an inter-dimensional portal.

i.e. if you want to overlay @KentBeck 3X model onto PST (and this might be completely wrong) ... then in the evolution of a single act, you not only have many diffusion curves, many chasms and major points of inertia but probably different types of explore [A] and [B]

Or if you wish, you could use the whole of @KentBeck 3X structure recursively. It feels like there is something here but then I stopped experimenting on companies long ago (you can only really experiment when you run the company). I hope someone goes exploring.