Organisational Multidexterity
Every successful organisation faces the same challenge: excelling at today’s business while inventing tomorrow’s. Products follow S-curves, and the next curve has to start before the current one peaks. That is exactly when the pressure to keep exploiting the present is strongest.
Beyond Ambidexterity The established answer, organisational ambidexterity, describes two modes: exploring the new and exploiting the proven. But the jump straight from one to the other is where most innovations die. “Organisations do not need two hands. They need at least three.” Between discovery and scale lies an essential middle phase: taking a rough idea and making it reliable, repeatable and ready for scale. We call this phase exacting, and the capacity to explore, exact and exploit, all at the same time, organisational multidexterity.
Three Modes, Three Ways of Working
- Explore: discover what is new. Success is measured by learning. These are the pioneers.
- Exact: turn “it works sometimes” into “it works every time”. These are the settlers.
- Exploit: scale and optimise what is proven. Success is measured by efficiency, throughput and margin. These are the town planners.
Each mode has its own culture and its own measures of success. Judging exploration by the criteria of exploitation kills it before it can prove itself.
Why It Does Not Happen by Itself Organisations lean towards exploitation by design, not through a lack of imagination. Resources flow to predictable returns, processes are tuned to the current business, and in a shared structure exploitation wins every time. That is why multidexterity is a structural capability, not a leadership aspiration. Each mode needs its own structure, resources, governance and success criteria, and investment has to be balanced across today’s core business, emerging opportunities and future possibilities.
The Pain of Letting Go Making room for the new also means letting go of structures that once worked, and that is a real loss. Reorganisation, in this light, signals adaptation rather than failure.
Part of a Bigger Picture Organisational multidexterity is one of the four dimensions of an adaptive organisation, together with Fast Improvement Cycles, Solution Orientation and Adaptive Leadership. The dimensions are a lens, not a methodology. Adaptivity emerges from two foundations, structures that enable fast change and healthy relationships between people, teams and the systems that connect them, and it rests on twelve principles. Our book Adaptive Organisations: Thriving in Complexity sets all of this out; this dimension is the subject of chapter 7.