The Rise of the Ambidextrous Organization

The Secret Revolution Happening Right Under Your Nose

Eric Zabiegalski

• Publisher: Business Research Consulting (BRC)
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781646333400
• Topic: Negocios y empresa
• Subtopic: Desarrollo organizacional

Research into formerly high performing organizations has consistently found that organizational exploitation drives out exploration. What does that mean? It’s simple: As organizations exploit the marketplace by doing what they do best for profit and market share, they consequently stop exploring and looking for new ideas; they stop learning in critical ways that could guarantee future success. The solution is the practice of organizational ambidexterity, the ability to be simultaneously exploitative and explorative in the marketplace, managing both elements in a rhythmic balance and dance that promote both short- and long-term performance and success. Mastering ambidexterity is not easy and takes a certain amount of trust and grit; however, for the companies that adopt this model and routinely execute it, it is a combination that works.

This book has been designed to take you on a journey, entertain you with stories, educate and stretch your current knowledge and thinking, and encourage you to reflect and question the world in which you live. It begins by reviewing the elements of the ambidextrous organization: culture, leadership, learning, and structure. It then addresses the environment of complexity, with discussions of the science of complexity, equilibrium, symmetry, structure, emergence, chaos, and governance. The third part presents strategies to help you cultivate an ambidextrous mind by overcoming some hurdles and being authentic. The book closes by describing how to arrive at organizational ambidexterity.

About the author: Eric Zabiegalski is an external organizational development consultant specializing in strategy, culture, and leadership development with an emphasis on innovation and creativity. He has worked in the private and public sectors, with for-profit and not-for-profit organizations, locally and nationally. In addition to his work as a consultant, Dr. Zabiegalski is a member of the World Institute of Action Learning Board of Directors and a professor at Webster University. He has a doctoral degree in human and organizational learning from The George Washington University.

ADVANCED PRAISE

“Dr. Zabiegalski is the rare scholar-practitioner who has the ability to incorporate cutting-edge theories such as complexity, psychology, philosophy, management science, action learning, and economics with his many years as a successful leader and consultant. This book captures his wisdom and common sense, which results in pages of great ideas and even greater recommendations on how the reader can build an ambidextrous learning organization. It’s a wonderful book, and I highly recommend it to anyone who is seeking to build an organization that can lead and learn in a turbulent world.” — Michael J. Marquardt, Professor Emeritus, George Washington University, and Co-founder, World Institute for Action Learning

“Every once in a while, a book comes around

1

Introduction

Here’s the bottom line regarding learning and organizations: Research into formerly high performing organizations has consistently found that organizational exploitation drives out exploration. What does that mean? It’s simple: As organizations exploit the marketplace by doing what they do best for profit and market share, they consequently stop exploring and looking for new ideas; they stop learning in critical ways that could guarantee future success. It’s not hard to do in companies, if you think about it. For one thing, it’s difficult to do two things at once, particularly if those two things appear to conflict with one another or be unrelated, requiring different thinking and acting. Secondly, there always seems to be some other “alligators close to the boat” that need immediate swatting before you can even think about exploring, being creative, or learning anything new. Companies that adopt this exploitation lather, rinse, and repeat mindset, however, risk losing the balance they once had between everyday performance and innovative creativity and the ability to leverage learning in new ways that guarantee sustained long-term success. To put this performance strategy into a sports metaphor, they’re setting themselves up for a great short game but no long one!

The Solution of Ambidexterity

If 40-plus years of research about exploitation and exploration says this is an inevitable dilemma, and it does, then what’s the solution? The solution is the practice of organizational ambidexterity, the ability to be simultaneously exploitative and explorative in the marketplace, managing both elements in a rhythmic balance and dance that promote both short- and long-term performance and success. Mastering ambidexterity is not easy and takes a certain amount of trust and grit; however, for the companies that adopt this model and routinely execute it, like Toyota and Google, it is a combination that works and works well.

Organizations seldom consider their historical behavior and are often unaware of the evolutionary changes that led them into this success trap of continually favoring exploitation over exploration. Some companies feel as though they lack the resources, knowledge, or ability to risk growing through exploration, while others fall into a pattern perpetuated by cultural or structural inertia, becoming too resistant to change either by norms, stories, and company rules (culture) or by having an organizational business structure that is too rigid to adopt anything but the smallest of changes (structural). When this happens, the organizations effectively become a “one-trick pony.” So, what does it take to have an ambidextrous organization—an AO?

Definitions

Before we dive into the types of organizational ambidexterity in an AO, let’s cover a few definitions.

Exploitation is the refinement of existing knowledge within an organization’s departments. It is associated with making existing improvements and incremental adjustments and increasing efficiency—in other words, it’s the business of doing better what you have already learned to do.

Exploration, on the other hand, is the pursuit of new knowledge, which includes variety generation, distant search, risk taking, experimentation, and discovery. In other words, it’s learning to do new things for the first time.

Organizational ambidexterity, then, is defined as the ability of an organization to both explore and exploit, to compete in mature technologies and markets where unique knowledge, efficiency, control, and incremental improvement are prized and in new technologies and markets where flexibility, autonomy, and experimentation are needed. By now it should be apparent that all these traits are great ones to have! Let’s look at the three types of ambidexterity in practice today, but first let’s review the AO model.

The Model

The ambidextrous organization model shows where all organizations go and where most stop. All organizations begin ambidextrously by either looking for or learning how to do something well. In this depiction, the company is “driving down,” exploratively looking for products or trying to perfect the products it’s chosen, exploit them, and dominate the market with them for profit. After a period of time, this is achieved, and the exploration practices turn to exploitation and the model flips. Now the company is almost exclusively driving down into exploitation—and, for most organizations, this is where the model ends.

There may be intermittent (passing) periods of exploration—i.e., the boss gets a new idea, an enthusiastic new employee pitches an innovative idea, or the annual company off-site happens, and people feel free to let their hair down and express their ideas freely in this atmosphere. But ambidextrous organizations go beyond the dotted line in the model and the model changes one more time, this time internally. When this happens, the explorative part of the organization takes up residence permanently as the capstone of the organization while the exploitative processes become the foundation; each is respected and of equal stature and importance philosophically, and each feeds and supports the other. The explorative part of the company innovates and provides new competencies for the exploitative part, and the exploitative part tethers and resources the explorative, providing foundation and muse for it. What my research into ambidexterity told me was that experiencing ambidexterity was not rare; however, sustaining it was.

The ambidextrous organization model (Zabiegalski, 2015).

Three Types of Ambidexterity

The first type, temporal ambidexterity, is practiced by all organizations, whether they realize it or not. When you think of temporal ambidexterity, think about switching back and forth from exploitative to explorative behavior and back again at some specified time. If you’re practicing temporal ambidexterity, your organization is taking a break from “converging,” focusing intently on what it does best, and switching to “diverging” and widening the focus onto new things. Temporally ambidextrous practices might be your company picnic once a year or that team-building retreat you go to in the mountains. It might be an annual convention or anything the company endorses that encourages you to take in new learning and operate in less or differently structured spaces.

Structural ambidexterity, the next type, can be described as a separate “explorative” space created by the organization in which it is allowable to explore and be creative or innovative. To understand this type, think of any organization with a research and development department, advanced development division, or creative space. Examples of this include Disney’s “DreamWorks” division or Lockheed Martin’s famous aircraft “Skunkworks.” A structurally ambidextrous space is any designated space where it’s permissible to be creative or innovative.

Our last type, contextual ambidexterity, is the most difficult type for an organization to achieve but arguably the best. It’s safe to say that when you reach this level, you and your organization have arrived as an AO. To understand contextual ambidexterity, think about biology at a cellular level. Ambidexterity, the ability to exploit and explore in appropriate amounts and at appropriate times, reaches your organization’s culture down to the individual employee level. No “switching” rules (temporal ambidexterity) are required by the organization at this point, though they most likely still happen, and no specific explorative safe “space” (structural ambidexterity) is needed, though you may still have one. The whole organization functions as one productive and creative space as needed. This kind of ambidexterity gets into a company’s DNA!

About This Book

To help you get the most from this book, it has been designed to take you on a journey, entertain you with stories, educate and stretch your current knowledge and thinking, and encourage you to reflect and question the world in which you live. Whether you read it once and put it down, bend pages and highlight passages, write in the margins as if you’re having a conversation with it, use it as a desk reference, or leave it on the board room table of your West Coast office after reading it on the flight out, it matters little; if you read it, it will change you forever.

This book is divided into four parts. The first part discusses elements of AO: culture, leadership, learning, and structure. Afterwards, the environment of complexity is addressed, with discussions of the science of complexity, equilibrium, symmetry, structure, emergence, chaos, and governance. The third part presents strategies to help you cultivate an ambidextrous mind by overcoming some hurdles and being authentic. The book closes by describing how to arrive at organizational ambidexterity.

PART I: THE ELEMENTS OF ORGANIZATIONAL AMBIDEXTERITY

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Culture

What Is Organizational Culture?

Edgar Schein, a famous cultural researcher, once commented that “perhaps the single most important thing a leader does for their organization is set that organization’s culture.”³ If you only accomplish this one task, then theoretically you will be guaranteed a great organization. I believe this theory wholeheartedly and would add that if you do not intentionally set your company culture, one will take shape anyway that you might not like or even understand. Since current academic thinking says it takes 7 years to change a company’s culture, this can be a scary thought!

Organizational culture is a concept that represents the beliefs, values, and assumptions shared within an organization and has its roots in anthropology, sociology, psychology, and other social science disciplines. First hypothesized in the 1920s, it wasn’t taken seriously by businesses until the 1970s and remains open to new interpretation and discovery today. There are still leaders who believe culture is pure bunk. There is no convincing these organizational “flat-earthers” otherwise (no offense to real flat-earthers). The rest of us, however, know that companies both contain and create cultures. So, what type of behaviors and practices are not compatible with an ambidextrous organization (AO) culture? Let’s take a look.

Cultural Ambidexterity

As discussed in the introduction, there is one type of ambidexterity, contextual, that gets into a company’s culture right down to its very DNA; we can refer to this type as cultural ambidexterity. To gain cultural ambidexterity, you must have a strong, aware, courageous, and caring leader with the heart of a teacher and learner (more on the ambidextrous leader in chapter 3). You must also begin with a healthy, open, and learning culture, as opposed to one whose members are stacking sand bags at their desks.

In her great article “How to Kill Creativity,” researcher and writer Teresa Amabile said there are many unfortunate behaviors that kill the explorative, creative, or innovative side of organizations, i.e., that kill ambidexterity!⁴ Perhaps the best way of describing an ambidextrous culture is by telling you what it’s not and what it shouldn’t be. Here’s a list built upon Teresa’s research that may reveal the barriers to ambidexterity lurking in your hallways:

•Homogeneous teams

•Leaders and managers with little or no knowledge of their employees

•Criticality or negativity bias towards new ideas

•A climate of fear concerning the introduction of new ideas

•An organizational ecosystem that kills creativity

•Lack of a safety net for mistakes; lack of value placed on failure

•Little intrinsic motivation/only monetary reward systems (i.e., pay for performance)

•Lack of sharing problem-solving solutions

•Lack of valuing knowledge from disparate fields

•Lack of a place for slower learners to “explore the maze”

•No allowance for incubation

•Lack of thought given to job matching

•Tight control of resources (when unnecessary)

•Poor use of physical space and lack of design considerations

Ask yourself objectively if you’re suffering ...