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As Organizations evolve, across appropriate organizational stages (from innovation driven high growth startups to enterprises), there are certain common presets (capabilities & competence) relevant to discrete evolutionary stages, which are evident (& essential), in getting optimum organizational results. While this is not a prescriptive read, however, from what we have observed, the lack of relevant presets, appropriate to the organizational stage, impacts organizations varyingly, from sub-optimal results to exposing their vulnerabilities to market (determined by competitive forces, technology advancement rate and consumer cycles).
At The Brew, cos of our work with organizations spread out over lifecycle (& quite many of these organizations in the transformational phases in the lifecycle), we have come to realize that, while the presence of these presets are highly essential to be driving attributes of organizational progress & success, its absence will not only impact the organizational performance, but can lead to existential vulnerabilities, should they be left out, in oversight of other things.
For example, one of the high growth fintech organization, that we worked with, were on steep growth trajectory, and given the market dynamics, going slow on growth was not an option. Working with the leadership team, we realized that we have to ensure complete alignment of organizational goals of all stakeholders, & only then will scalability be the multiplier to our course. Had we focused on scaling up rather, without having these presets well placed, we would have expended substantive organizational energies to compensate the technical debt & negatively impacting our metrics at an overall level.
Conversely, if the organization is not able to build capabilities & capacities of efficiency as expansion occurs to new markets, it will negatively impact its metrics, as without efficiency, the organization will be unable to pass the value benefits to the consumers (of existing & newer markets), essential in reinforcing value proposition across markets.
So what are these presets (see the table below), & why are they a leading driver of organization’s impact, as we reason this below, this is how the presets contribute to organizational outcomes:
- In making an organization most prepared to be success-ready (success is ability to reach their potential and/or objective), should the appropriate presets exists, as relevant to the stage of organization
- serve as a transformation playbook to subsequent stages with relevant presets of that stage & building the success readiness to loop back to point a
- this largely goes unnoticed, in the transitory phase between point a & b, transforming from presets of a to presets of b, certain things are consistent & constant, across the entire organizational lifecycle. These mainly are Essentials of High Performing organizations (covered amply in our other posts), elementarily serve as building blocks, & keeping in check, the veracity of requisites v/s. reality
Organizational Stages & Presets : Reading the table
Let’s deep dive across discrete organizational stages to see interplay of presets, vis a vis, overall impact. In early stages, when the organization is figuring its business model, the focus is to develop a viable business model, post ascertaining product market fit & monetization possibilities. The lead of moving the needle is taken in-house, predominantly, by Product teams, Engineering teams etc, to come out with a viable business proposition.
The key metrics of success are to get to the standard yardstick of Paid Customers, Repeat Paid Customers, CSAT, & NPS vis a vis the pseudo metrics which are non revenue based. Getting to standard business yardstick involves a lot of grit, perseverance, mixed with high opportunistic sense to plug consumer gaps, with high speed feedbacks & improvised actions. Now one can visualize well, the presets & its mapping relevance to current stage. At this stage, the organization’s strategy is to drive traction, with a structure built to drive speed & agility, process capabilities necessitating.
Similarly, for organizations in scaling up phase, the traction strategy in startup phase, shifts to growth one. and so does the structure, process capabilities & talent capabilities. Sales takes lead in this & hence, talent capabilities need to be on creative, persuasive & on customer advocacy side, & process capabilities aligned to being Scalable & Effective. That’s how organization progresses through the spectrum, with relevance of different presets across relevant stages of organization.
While the above sheds considerable light on the contributory role of presets to organizational success, wrt to its phase – underlying the entire framework, are the essentials of high performance organizations, which are as critical as the presets, as that is something which stays consistent & constant across all the stages. These have to be incorporated by design, from the earliest of the phases, & while there does exist commonalities between certain presets & these essentials, to our minds, they along with presets, represent a must have, a necessary condition to suffice.