Transcript
Edited for readability.
The efficiency paradigm
There is a paradigm shift we are beginning to see — in how organisations view themselves, and in how individuals within organisations also need to view themselves. We are calling it a shift from the efficiency paradigm to a contribution paradigm.
What do we mean by it?
In the efficiency paradigm, the world was about creating value by reducing cost and increasing productivity — by trying to extract more out of existing resources.
It is also built around the notion that human beings are fundamentally resources, who need to be exploited, or leveraged, by the organisation in the best possible way.
This is the efficiency paradigm we have been operating in, as a product of the industrial age.
The contribution paradigm
Over the last ten years particularly, and perhaps over the last 15 or 20, there has been a gradual shift to what you can call the contribution paradigm. In a way, it has been supported and accelerated by automation, by digital, by the advent of all the new technologies.
The contribution paradigm starts with the notion that the individual has infinite potential. The individual is therefore not a resource, but someone who can create enormous new orders of value.
It also means that organisations are actually networks of these individuals, connecting with each other and trying to build radically new value propositions for their customers and the people around them.
And in such organisations, you start viewing the organisation less as an institution and more as a collective — one that is trying to build new forms of relationship and new forms of engagement with its customer groups and with the communities in which it operates.
So it is fundamentally a shift from an extractive model — where you look at a limited set of resources and try to be efficient and productive with them — to a paradigm where you are looking at effectively infinite resources. Because the resources now start with individuals: with knowledge, with design, with an infinite capacity to create value, and with enabling technologies that allow you to transmit all this at scale and speed, at almost zero cost.
That is the shift in paradigm from which we begin.
Characteristics of the shift
What does this paradigm finally involve from an organisation’s point of view?
Outcomes over processes. First, we start focusing on outcomes rather than processes. You ask: what is it that we want to make happen, in completely new ways?
From relationships and transactions to engagement. Relationships are more about personal, human connect; transactions are another mode. We are looking at a shift from relationships and transactions to a new space of engagement, where the two are integrated into new, value-creating conversations.
Speed and agility are obviously characteristics of such a world.
Value creation is obviously the most important parameter the collective as a whole looks at.
Sustainable evolution. What is also interesting is that, in the longer run, such a paradigm implies sustainable evolution. Why? Because when I am contributing to others and meeting outcomes, it means not just meeting immediate financial or business outcomes, but also meeting deeper human outcomes, deeper societal outcomes, and more sustainable, long-term outcomes. So even the quality of outcomes starts to change — and that is accelerated by engagement with customers.
These elements talk to each other. Engagement with customers and sustainable evolution talk to each other. Value creation and the focus on outcomes talk to each other. And design, speed and agility work together to create radically new architectures through which we deliver all of this.
That is how we see the paradigm unfolding as we move from the efficiency paradigm.
The role of contributors
The unit of thinking in the efficiency paradigm was a resource, or a collection of resources — whether raw material, finance or anything else. The unit in the contributor paradigm is an individual who thinks like a contributor.
So the important point we are making is this: the rate at which an organisation moves from the efficiency paradigm to the contributor paradigm is determined by the number of contributors in that organisation.
If an organisation has very few contributors, its ability to move from an efficiency paradigm to a contribution paradigm is limited and constrained, because there aren’t enough people to take up the different sub-models within the system. If I see a business as a network of several component models, then few contributors means only some aspects can work in a contribution mode, while the rest continue to operate in an efficiency mode.
Contributors exist by chance
The second thing we are saying is that in today’s world these contributors exist — but they exist by chance.
Our own experience has been that a degree from a top university is not necessarily a guarantee that somebody will be a contributor. Contributors are not determined by qualifications or background. They are determined by the way they think, and by what they bring to the table as individuals.
We have seen in our work over several years that contributors can come from anywhere in an organisation. It is not a hierarchical thing, and it is not based on the dimensions we have traditionally considered useful. Intelligence, for example, does not by implication make somebody a contributor. A person may not be as smart as somebody else, and still be a contributor.
Nurturing contributors
Contributors are very important, because what we are saying is that the drivers of the new world are contributors. But we don’t know how to find them, and we don’t know how to recognise them.
We do know when they are operating. We can recognise them by their actions. You can see there are people who are making a big difference, people who are pushing the envelope with new ways of thinking, people who are bringing new orders of value into an organisation. You can see them by their impact — but you don’t know how to recognise or find them in advance.
This is really the problem statement we are putting on the table. Our goal is to build and nurture contributors by design in organisations, so that it accelerates their movement towards a new paradigm — a new way of thinking about the world.