Why Businesses Need a Sensemaking Framework to Navigate Change
A sensemaking framework helps businesses anticipate changes in their competitive landscape, reducing the uncertainty and risk that often paralyze innovation efforts. High-performing businesses manage through periods of stability interspersed by periods of purposeful change. But businesses that struggle with sustainable performance often don’t change soon enough, fast enough, or they implement the wrong change.
All businesses undergo periods of change. They can stumble when trying to change due to an inability to deal with uncertainty and risk.
- Uncertainty about the future suppresses taking action to prepare for it in the present.
- The risk of making the wrong change inhibits taking any action.
High-impact change is triggered either in response to changes in the Business Landscape, or by a desire to deliberately cause change in the Business Landscape. Change initiatives become more uncertain and higher risk if the Business Landscape is not understood or is ill-defined.
Understanding the Business Landscape Through Sensemaking Framework
The Business Landscape can feel complex, complicated, and ambiguous. If this is the case, you can’t reliably evaluate the prospects for change and effectively prepare for probable future states. The inhibiting effects of uncertainty and risk can suppress responding to the changing Business Landscape.
Uncertainty and risk can result in your business:
- Getting frozen in place, being unable to decide what to do, what to change, or what to develop
- Getting stuck in development busyness, hoping that desirable new solutions will eventually emerge
- Developing a new solution for a problem nobody has
- Developing a new solution for the wrong problem
- Developing a poor solution for the right problem
How Our Sensemaking Framework Accelerates Innovation
Agile Innovating anticipates the impact of changes in the Business Landscape to reduce uncertainty and minimize risk, repositioning businesses to accelerate new solution development by acting sooner and executing faster.
We call anticipating the impact of changes “Sensemaking.”
Utilizing our unique Status Quo Model, we make sense of “What is changing,” “What is likely to change,” and “What has the potential to change” in the Business Landscape, and how fast. This sensemaking framework provides the clarity needed to move forward with confidence.
The Status Quo Model: Core of the Sensemaking Framework
Let’s take a close look at the Status Quo Model:
The three environments, which both define and constrain the status quo, are:
- The Solution Environment, which includes all competing solutions and the differentiation on which they compete
- The Business Environment, which includes all competitors involved in providing solutions, their individual business architectures, and their distinctive capabilities
- The Market Environment, which includes the customers and users who acquire solutions, and the jobs the solutions are intended to do
Three Critical Experience Intersections
The intersection of the Market and Solution Environments yields the User Experience, a consequence of the Job-Being-Done and the particular Solution Specification.
The intersection of the Solution and Business Environments yields the Business Experience, based upon the Basis of Competition and Business Capabilities.
The intersection of the Business and Market Environments yields the Market Experience, based upon the Customer Segments and the competing Business Architectures.
Applying the Sensemaking Framework to Create Distinctive Solutions
Innovating is based upon the premise that your new solution will provide a better User, Business, and Market Experience than existing solutions. The new solution must create new value for the User, capture new value for the Business, and deliver new value to the Market.
By clarifying the current state of the three types of experience, you can anticipate changing the status quo with a distinctive new solution that improves the experiences.
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