Link: https://blog.cutter.com/2019/03/20/how-your-organization-can-achieve-the-ambidextrous-advantage/
From The Cutter Blog
Organizational resilience is emerging as a key source of competitive advantage in the age of hyper-competition and disruption. A new breed of leaders understands that winning requires being ambidextrous—the ability to embrace both speed/creativity and scale/productivity.
In their Executive Update “Ambidextrous Organizations: How to Embrace Disruption and Create Organizational Advantage,” Cutter Consortium Senior Consultants Wilhelm Lerner and Marten Zieris introduce the Ambidextrous Organization Development Canvas—a model that drills down from 6 design dimensions into 72 specific business capabilities to help organizations develop a common language and make decisions on organization transformation priorities.
To move toward ambidexterity, organizations use the concept of capability building blocks to determine their desired individual organizational equilibrium. This approach is based on three steps:
- Conduct an organizational assessment. Assess your organization against a set of capability
building blocks, giving the business a unifying language to express the current
state of the organization. Knowing where you are now creates the foundations
for an organizational transformation roadmap. - Build an organizational target picture based on your strategic ambition. Determine the right target model to
support the strategic cornerstones defined by top management. This provides a
compass for the organizational development journey. The primary focus should be
on how you change steering/transformation dimensions, as this is the essential
layer that will make the whole new organization work, combining multiple
systems in one organization. - Derive the necessary measures to build up the capabilities. The result of the third step is a
transformation roadmap that should speak to your organization and its needs. This
must address people’s mindsets, revamp organizational practices and routines,
provide the necessary tools and methods for transformation, and, above all,
outline and promote new leadership behaviors. If it does not, it is doomed to
fail fast.
In “Ambidextrous Organizations: How to Embrace Disruption and Create Organizational Advantage”, Lerner and Zieris demonstrate how applying the Ambidextrous Organization Development Canvas will help you increase the resilience of your organization by complementing your existing skill set with speed/creativity capabilities, enabling you to respond adequately to external disruptions. (If you’re not a Cutter Consortium member you can download a copy of the article here.) Wilhelm Lerner will also be delivering a webinar on the topic next week (March 27, 12PM EDT). You can get more information and register here.
For more on the Ambidextrous Organization
Cutter Consortium Research: Cutter Consortium Members can read Ambidextrous
Organizations: How to Embrace Disruption and Create Organizational Advantage,
by Wilhelm Lerner and Marten Zieris.
Register to attend the webinar, Ambidextrous: The New Organization Archetype and learn how to master the balance between the opposing imperatives of speed/creativity and scale/productivity systems.
