Deeply understanding the situations customers are in, the jobs they are trying to get done in those situations, and the outcomes they are seeking is vital to anticipating how those situations might change.

We’ve explored the idea of an arena, rather than an industry, as being a crucial level of analysis. We’ve looked at how irritants and blockers in key stakeholders’ paths to getting jobs done can open the door to an inflection sparked by an organization that removes those attributes. We’re now on the brink of considering what actions should be taken next.

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.

Building innovation proficiency is an organizational learning endeavor, and learning and mastering do not happen instantly.