I thought this was a very interesting commentary on what our team is doing--a lot of our work is shifting from the "c model" to the "d model" which is why it's so mindbending. And it's why our team is smart:)

http://cultureby.com/2010/10/a-special-teams-unit-for-the-corporation.html

OCT

25

A “SPECIAL TEAMS” UNIT FOR THE CORPORATION

By Grant

The corporation is very good at problem solving.

Next to getting things done, this is what it does best.  

The trouble is the problems are getting tougher.

This is exactly what we would expect.  After all, the world is speeding up.  Most corporations expect to reinvent themselves continually, and they do.  This is what it is to live in the world that Tom (Peters) built.

In the event that someone missed the news, the business presses put us on notice with titles like "Faster," "Blur," "Out of Control," "Blown to Bits" "Fast Forward," "Creative Destruction." We are learning to live with dynamism.

Please have a look at my little model above.

I believe we've spent most of the last 20 years learning to live with life at (C).  This is where problems are difficult but not intractable.  They test our systems and our assumptions, but with a concerted effort we can put things right.  Often the corporation will call in the consultants, send everyone off to a brainstorm or two, and search it's soul until old models and assumptions are unrooted, and a new approach is put in place.  

Whew!  We're good for 6 months.

Now is the time to prepare ourselves for living at (D).  This is where the world inflicts upon us a blind side hit so grievous that we feel exactly like the quarterback who was just visited by a defensive end weighing 260 pounds and travelling at ten yards a second (over 40 yards). The coach asks "How many fingers?" The QB replies, "let me get back to you on that one."  

We are now much better at opposable problem solving and creative thinking.  We are better at collaboration, brainstorms and skunk works.  We are better at "thinking outside the box," and a host of other cliches.  

But we have gone a long way to go.  The thing about (D) is that we have to think our way out of confusion.  And the only way to do that is to embrace assumptions we know are wrong.  And to put these assumptions into constellations we know are wrong. 

We are terraforming.  We are creating a great mass of bad ideas as a platform on which to create some good ideas.  ??? (D) is now beginning to look more like (C).  Eventually, this will give way to (B). And eventually, for a brief while, we will be at (A).  

Now it used to be enough to build our new systems when we got to D.  But it's clear, I think, that we need a faster response time.  We need a team of people who spend their professional lives creating new models, lots of new models, so that if and when the corporation finds itself at (D), it's got alternative ideas at the ready.  By this reckoning the corporation will now constantly entertain many visions of itself, so to protect against against intellectual stasis that comes from (D).

This Special Teams unit doesn't have to have the perfect answer.  (Guess who spent too much time watching football yesterday?  How bout them Browns?)  But it has several possible models, each of which is far enough along that the corporation can be returned to (C) and retrieved from the wilderness and the horror of (D).  The trouble with (D) is that there is no platform. There's just chaos.  And failure.

Installation of new models, that's another model.  Someone from the Special Teams unit will suddenly appear at our desk.  The conversation will go something like this,

"Oh oh. Special Teams. You people are never fun."

"We just want to put a new model in places.  Not to worry.  Won't take long.  You know, the way we've been thinking about product innovation?  Ok.  Here's the new model.  And you know the way we distinguished between the collaboration and competition?  Big change there.  Here's the way it works now."

Remember when we used to terrify one another with stories of how the Japanese could re-engineer a product line with almost no downtime.  That's what we are looking at here.  A kind of corporation reprogramming that can be made to happen almost in real time.  

Technical change will continue to speed up.  Cultural changes will continue to speed up. The corporation is going to have to make ready.  It's going to take on new order of intellectual difficulty.  It's going to need a new order of intellectual power.  And, yes, it's going to need a Special Teams unit. 

References

Brown, Tim. 2009. Change by Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation. HarperBusiness.  

Champy, James, and Nitin Nohria. 1996. Fast Forward: The Best Ideas on Managing Business Change. Harvard Business Press.  

Cowen, Tyler. 2004. Creative Destruction: How Globalization Is Changing the World's Cultures. Princeton University Press.  

Davis, Stan, and Christopher Meyer. 1999. Blur: The Speed of Change in the Connected Economy. 1st ed. Grand Central Publishing.  

Evans, Philip, and Thomas S. Wurster. 1999. Blown to Bits: How the New Economics of Information Transforms Strategy. 1st ed. Harvard Business Press.  

Foster, Richard, and Sarah Kaplan. 2004. Creative Destruction: Why Companies That Are Built to Last Underperform the Market--And How to Successfully Transform Them. Reprint. Crown Business.  

Gleick, James. 2000. Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything. 1st ed. Vintage.  

Grove, Andrew S. 1999. Only the Paranoid Survive: How to Exploit the Crisis Points That Challenge Every Company. First. Crown Business.  

Handy, Charles. 1995. The Age of Paradox. Harvard Business Press.  

Handy, Charles. 1991. The Age of Unreason. 1st ed. Harvard Business Press.  

Kelly, Kevin. 1995. Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems, & the Economic World. Basic Books.  

Lessig, Lawrence. 2008. Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy. Penguin Press.  

Martin, Roger L. 2009. Opposable Mind: How Successful Leaders Win Through Integrative Thinking. Harvard Business School Press.  

McCracken, Grant.  2006.  Flock and Flow: Predicting and Managing Cultural Change in a Dynamic Marketplace.  Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Peters, Tom. 2006. Re-Imagine!: Business Excellence in a Disruptive Age. DK.

Peters, Tom. 1988. Thriving on Chaos: Handbook for a Management Revolution. Harper Paperbacks.