Thread by @swardley

Interesting, the idea of different roles in managing the decline ->

https://twitter.com/indiqicom/status/1353241698676006915

My only comment is that the Town Planners should either be turning it into a utility or outsourcing it to someone else who provides it as a utility. So, I see this as potentially different i.e. "what to do if you've failed to manage it" ... let me modify @KateRaworth cycle.

Now, I know that path, the path of failing to manage evolution is very common and many companies are caught with that.

That disposal (liability) is also where we do our "transformation" efforts which seem to be another way of saying "catching up with where the rest of the industry was a over decade ago" i.e. getting rid of home grown liability and starting to use common utilities.

So, there might be some legs in this. It's certainly an interesting idea - the structure needed to manage the decline.

But the proof is always in the eating. Pioneer - Settler - Town Planner was born out of practice, of live experimentation ... the theory came after. You'll need someone willing to explore with an operating company to find out if this works.

And that's a word of caution, that experimentation needs to happen. We've had enough "brilliant" ideas in organisation design (i.e. bimodal) that were clearly not built on actual practice / experimentation but were promoted wide and far. Never a good idea.

So, back in the days when I was running companies, I probably would have experimented with @KateRaworth idea.

That's a call out to some CEO somewhere willing to take a few guided risks. Do a bit of experimentation, give it a try.

Do remember, we are all still learning how to organise companies. There is no right model and such experimentation is necessary for us to progress.

X : What's wrong with bimodal?
Me : In my experience it reinforces warfare within the organisation - blog.gardeviance.org/2014/11/bimoda…
X : You prefer trimodal?
Me : I don't like the term trimodal though I use it. That implies that 3 is the magic number. Think of it more as greater than 2.

It could be five, it could six, it could even be context specific and there are cases where you can "restrict" what you do to in effect get away with two i.e settling - town planning or pioneering - settling. Hence I tend to italicise or quote "trimodal" i.e. it's not sufficient.

What you need to understand is I stopped running companies and hence experimenting with them in 2006. Pioneer - Settler - Town Planner was as far as I got. You need someone (i.e. a CEO) to experiment on a running company to progress this. I'd suggest looking at Haier.

X : The CEO as the great experimenter?
Me : That's the role if the purpose is to adapt, to survive, to grow. It's part of "gardening" i.e. trying new things. If the purpose is wealth extraction however then the role is more "don't rock the boat", synergies (i.e. cutting costs)

X : You're saying that "managing the decline" is a consequence of failure to manage evolution?
Me : Yes. When we fail to turn something into a utility or to excise it from the company then we are into managing decline which often involves some later "big bang transformation".

X : Often?
Me : Yes, It also often involves a cliff. It's not a good place to be but lots of companies find themselves in that boat because they fail to manage evolution. I'd be curious to what org structure works. In such areas I tend to encourage "sweat and acquire" ...

... i.e. sweat the asset, buy similar distressed assets, smash them together and "synergise" (i.e. cut costs), return wealth to shareholders and repeat.
X : What does that do?
Me : Buys you time, in the hope you get a lucky break or can sort out some part of the organisation.

X : What if that doesn't work.
Me : Well, there's the cliff. You can stretch out organisations for some time to avoid it. Useful if retirement is around the corner.

Which is also why I judge CEO performance on the state of the company, 7 years after they have left. It's too easy to stretch a company, wealth extract and jump.

X : Don't town planners manage decline of utility services?
Me : Utility services tend to evolve behind the scenes i.e. AWS EC2 today is not behind the scenes the same as AWS EC2 used to be, anymore than power generation today is the same as it used to be ...

... however, there will come a future point when EC2 (on chip) is disappearing as we've all moved to Lambda (on chip) and "compute infrastructure" is forgotten about by most. Whether that needs a different structure, I don't know. Only those experimenting with it would know.

X : How do you know that Pioneer - Settler - Town Planner is right?
Me : There is no right. There is only "Is this model consistently useful?" and even that will be temporary since a better model will be discovered.