Adaptive Design Principles

Designing an adaptive enterprise or business requires fundamental design principles. This post discusses the six broad six categories of adaptive design principles (agility, design thinking, model thinking, resiliency, service thinking and systems thinking) as outlined in the adaptive design principles catalog from The Gill Framework®. These principles can be tailored and applied in a particular context. For instance, these principles can guide the design of the adaptive enterprise capabilities, teams, processes, services, systems etc.

Agility

·         Flexibility: built-in flexible response to changes

·         Leanness: built-in quality with optimal or minimal resources

·         Learning: built-in analytics-information for continuous learning

·         Responsiveness: design for (response) change

·         Speed: quick timely response to changes and outcomes (e.g. faster time to market)

Design thinking

·         Action-oriented: practical, actionable and outcome-driven design

·         Fearless experimentation: design spikes, simulation, prototyping

·         Human-orientation: human-centric, empathetic (e.g. feeling, emotions)

·         Paradoxical design: balancing intuition-rationale,   ideas vs counter ideas

·         Showcasing: frequent design showcase, demonstration, feedback

Model thinking

·        Abstraction: abstraction of reality in models for communication, reasoning and sense making

·        Reusability: design for reusability (design patterns) and standardisation

·        Simplicity: making the complex things simple, simple design process

Resiliency

·         Defend: defence or resistance to attacks or threats, immediate response for stability

·         Evolve: evolutionary design to evolve into to a new ‘better’ state

Service thinking

·        Customer-orientation: customer-centric, customer-driven

·        Service economy: service is the fundamental unit of exchange (e.g. product or resource in a use is a service)

·        Value co-creation: design or value or outcome is co-created through the active engagement of stakeholders or beneficiaries

·        Value determination: beneficiary determines the value

·        Value proposition: continuous discovery of value proposition (new or better or alternative offerings)

Systems thinking

·         Autonomous: self-sufficient independent components, parts or elements

·         Context-awareness: scan and sense information for adaptability

·         Collaboration-oriented: active engagement, collaboration-focused, participatory design

·         Holism: holistic systems thinking involving inputs, outputs, outcomes, processes, parts, constraints, culture, norms and feedback for identifying and dealing with changes for adaptation

·         Interdependent: nested autonomous parts or elements of the whole (valuenet, value chain, value stream) which cannot exist independently

·         Integrated: open and non-linear integration of heterogeneous parts or elements

·         Living: a living dynamic system

·         Self-organising: built-in higher-levels of ordering for outcomes through feedback loops