With start-ups, incubators, buy-ins, spin-offs, etc., companies are testing different ways of developing new business models.
Companies often even start in an exploratory state as a form of start-up. To a certain extent, expanding the exploratory space also means returning to the company’s roots in order to create an awareness of the innovative culture’s core within the company.
An evolved company cannot disregard one thing and leave the other. There are different approaches to establishing an exploratory space while developing the field of implementation at the same time. John Kotter describes an integrative approach in his model of the “dual operating system.”
The core of the model is the intersection of the two operating systems—in this case the “exploratory space” and the “field of implementation.”
The aim is to further develop the company from within and build up a sustainable innovation culture. The key to making this happen is the employees and their interconnectedness. As the result of its versatility, the company is always on stable footing for whatever comes next.
From the first projects in the area of organizational development, we quickly learned that we have to expand the model of the “dual operating system” in order to work more consciously on the system itself. Together with our project partner Claudia Träger, we have further developed this space and called it a reflection space. It offers us the opportunity to take a step back and put the processes and methods to the test—and if necessary, discard them and rethink them.
Within the reflection space, the team develops the ability to distinguish between the two operating systems, but not to separate them. On the contrary: The aim of the reflection space is to connect the two operating systems—“exploratory space” and “field of implementation”—in an integrative way.
The more diverse and versatile a company is, the more resilient it is against turbulence and changes in the environment. Versatility is based on a company’s diversity, adaptability, and scope of action. The goal of the exploratory space is to develop, test, and filter a variety of strategic options. In this way, initial hypotheses become new opportunities that flow into the field of implementation.
Header photo by Caleb Woods