A Beacon for Future Explorations — Wrapping up Season 1 with Bill Fischer and Lisa Gansky

Podcast Notes

Whether you’ve been with us from the start or just discovered the podcast, we want to inform you that this is the last weekly episode for the season. We’re going to take a small break and come back in October, with a new lineup of special gusts. If you’re interested in supporting us or get involved, please contact us at [email protected] to explore ways to do so!

In the meantime, hope you can catch up on all previous episodes: https://boundaryless.io/resources/podcast/ 

In this episode, we have our two dear guests Lisa Gansky — the eternal entrepreneur, great thinker and our long term advisor — and Bill Fischer, professor at IMD in Lausanne with whom we’ve developed the very first Rendanheyi Masterclass based on Haier’s revolutionary organisational model and a partner in our long term research on the Entrepreneurial Ecosystem Enabling Organization.

In our conversation, we wanted to pick their brains on the key theses emerging from the research for our upcoming 2020 Whitepaper, such as acknowledging marketplace pervasiveness, seeing a systemic shift happening towards health and redrawing the human development thesis to reverse the trend that machine development has long outpaced human development.

Following an initial framing, Bill and Lisa take turns in providing amazing reflections on where the world seems to be headed, from an organisational, systems and cultural perspective and related to business ecosystems and innovation.

Here are some important links from the conversation

See the previous Podcast episodes with Lisa and Bill:

•  Checkpoint episode with Lisa Gansky: Ecosystems — between the “no more” and the “not yet”. https://stories.platformdesigntoolkit.com/checkpoint-episode-with-lisa-gansky-ecosystems-between-the-no-more-and-the-not-yet-c183d21257c4
•  Leadership as Architecting: Transforming Organisations into Thriving Ecosystems — with Bill Fischer. https://stories.platformdesigntoolkit.com/leadership-as-architecting-transforming-organisations-into-thriving-ecosystems-7-4af8dd0cf06c

Other references and mentions:

•  Warren Bennis, 1998. The Temporary Society: What is Happening to Business and Family Life in America Under the Impact of Accelerating Change. https://www.amazon.com/Temporary-Society-Happening-Accelerating-Management/dp/0787943312
•  Structural Shifts podcast by Aperture Hub, with Rita Gunther McGrath, Seeing Around Corners (#19): https://medium.com/aperture-hub/seeing-around-corners-19-ec64b2260337
•  Tessy Britton, “Universal Basic Everything” — .creating essential infrastructure for post Covid 19 neighbourhoods. https://medium.com/@TessyBritton/universal-basic-everything-f149afc4cef1
•  Simone Cicero, “An Entrepreneurial, Ecosystem Enabling Organization — What’s emerging from understanding Haier Group”. https://stories.platformdesigntoolkit.com/an-entrepreneurial-ecosystem-enabling-organization-c35eaf5acd9c

Find out more about the show and the research at Boundaryless at https://boundaryless.io/resources/podcast/

Thanks for the ad-hoc music to Liosound / Walter Mobilio. Find his portfolio here: www.platformdesigntoolkit.com/music

Recorded on July 1st 2020

Key insights

The temporary nature of so many of these marketplace connection reflects the need for things to happen both fast and experimentally. The ability to be in in a state of flux, to learn, evolve and continuously reinvent are some of the new rules of the game. As part of this trend, we can see how ecosystems provide such opportunities, being a more open system than traditional organizations. The story of Haier is telling in this regard, with CEO Zhang Ruimin expressing that: “We Either Evolve or We Become a Museum Exhibit”.

We’re living in a chaotic moment of history, with Covid-19 providing almost a laboratory for “make it or break it” dynamics. With regards to the question of moving beyond the “No more”, we’re sensing the end of a Cartesian era and the idea of mastering nature, towards an idea of leadership that is much more embodied, much more in present in creating entrepreneurship and creating real stuff, involving new constituents like local communities and providing an economy of essentials. It might be that, in this context, that organizations will revert to communities or to change from the old shareholder model that govern the last couple hundred years.

The fact that the word “strategy” did not appear in the first 75 minutes of conversation is telling of the fact that the ecosystemic shift is driving away from grand strategies (which becomes part of the No more) towards tactics, with improvisation and experimentation. In a positive note, this may mean that we move into a world where more people feel they have a stake in the outcome of what their organization does in a virtuous cycle of coexistence.

? Boundaryless Conversations Podcast is about exploring the future of large scale organising by leveraging on technology, network effects and shaping narratives. We explore how platforms can help us play with a world in turmoil, change, and transformation: a world that is at the same time more interconnected and interdependent than ever but also more conflictual and rivalrous.