Back to our analytical approach. The issue you need to focus on in your analysis of arenas is whether a change in the daily constraints that your business operates under might allow a competitor to address customer pain points differently or better than you do.

Launching aggressively into an approach with all the funding given up front is a recipe for disaster. Even if a project works out, the organization is unlikely to have developed the new workflows and practices that will allow it to benefit.

The dilemma is that when the challenges facing an organization are not about repeatable execution, but about innovation or responding to complexity, the idea of breaking things down into well-understood parts is not only unhelpful, it can also be a dangerous trap.

In a complex situation, when you want to empower the entire organization to be able to act without direction from the top, having a shared view of what the purpose is and how each participant fits into it is absolutely critical. It is only with a basis of a shared understanding of what we’re all trying to achieve here that distributed action is possible.

Empowering individuals to take action broadens the amount of experimentation an organization can undertake, increasing its odds of seeing the early warnings of an inflection point in a timely way.