Designing Delivery

Chapter 4. Designing for Failure, Operating to Learn

Digital infusion confronts post-industrial businesses with ever more complex environments. Traditional boundaries, such as those between back-office and front-office functions,¹ break down. Even the idea that IT is separate from the rest of the business, and from the means of customer engagement, comes under scrutiny. Brand management becomes exponentially harder when it has to reflect the operation of an entire service organization.

The continuously self-designing organization represents the triumph of complexity over complicatedness. Its autopoietic process is the ultimate expression of emergent structure. The organization and its components continually create, adapt, and rearrange one another. The shape of its structure becomes a dynamic process that unfolds over time. The history of that process reflects the history of the organization’s interactions with its customers and the market.

The flexibility that arises from continuous design dooms attempts at complicated-systems control. The digital conversational medium allows organizations to conduct intimate conversations with their customers. In the process, however, it forces digital businesses to reimagine their understanding of success and failure.

Industrial-era control mechanisms strive to identify and eradicate opportunities for failure. The ideal production workflow is error-free. It turns out products that are free from defects and identical to one another. In addition ...