Relax, don’t do it, if you want to compete

The Typhoon is arguably the world’s best fighter plane, and key to its success is its ‘relaxed stability’ design. That’s engineering speak for ‘without computers it would fly like a penguin tied to a chair’. That’s because the Typhoon is designed primarily for agility, which, not surprisingly, makes it rather unstable. Prioritising stability instead would have compromised its performance, in the same way that adding an outrigger to a kayak reduces the risk of capsizing, but reduces its speed and maneuverability.

Relaxed stability needs to be a feature of organisational design too if they are aiming to be as agile as the markets in which they operate. For example:

Traditional ‘fixed’ supply chains can be unleashed by the Internet of Things, where myriad suppliers, assemblers, and distributors can connect their spare capacity in real-time to minimise cost and lead-times.

Open-plan offices can enable teams to co-locate during a project, and then disperse once they’re done (even if such redesigns usually generate more resistance than Velcro). Even if we stay in the same job in the same company in the same location, what we do, who we do it with, and how we work together will change, necessitating offices that are designed to change with us.

The next off-site workshop could focus on how to make staff more responsive to the unknown, rather than the traditional approach to strategy of trying to predict the next 5 years with a list of assumptions (which will most likely end up being filed in the company archives under ‘fiction’).

These days, any organisation that values stability ahead of agility is a sitting duck (or penguin). Those who seek to have the competitive advantage of a Typhoon fighter jet – and are prepared to de-stabilize their organisations to achieve it – will thrive in an increasingly unpredictable environment.