Increasingly, industry structure is better characterised as ecosystems of codependent companies than as a handful of competitors producing similar goods and services and working on a stable, distant and transactional basis with their suppliers and customers. In such an environment, advantage will flow to those companies that can create effective strategies at the network or system level.
Adaptive companies are, therefore, learning how to push activities outside the company without benefiting competitors and how to design and evolve strategies for networks without necessarily being able to rely on strong control mechanisms. Typically, adaptive companies manage their ecosystems by using common standards to foster interaction with minimal barriers.
They generate trust among participants — for example, by enabling people to interact frequently and by providing transparency…. Adaptation is necessarily local in nature — somebody experiments first at a particular place and time. It is also necessarily global in nature, because if the experiment succeeds, it will be communicated, selected, amplified and refined.
So, organisations need to create environments that encourage the knowledge flow, diversity, autonomy, risk taking, sharing and flexibility on which adaptation thrives. Contrary to classical strategic thinking, strategy follows organisation in adaptive companies.
From “Adaptability: The New Competitive Advantage”