Solution Orientation

Solution Orientation Illustration

Ask most organisations what they do, and they describe what they deliver: products, services, features. Adaptive organisations start from the other end and ask what changes for the people they serve. This shift from inside-out to outside-in thinking is solution orientation: structuring teams, decisions and accountability around the outcomes delivered to customers, not around products, services or internal functions.

Output, Solution, Outcome

  • An output is what an organisation delivers: a product, a service, a feature, a report.
  • A solution is a set of outputs composed to address a specific customer problem.
  • An outcome is what changes for the people being served: the measurable improvement in their situation.

Most organisations measure outputs. Adaptive organisations measure outcomes. That is why “what is our solution?” is the first structural decision an adaptive organisation has to make.

From Component Teams to Solution Teams When teams are built around internal parts, “the customer’s problem falls into the gaps between teams, owned by everyone in part and by no one in full.” Solution teams are built around a slice of the solution that customers can see, and they own its outcome. Not every team can deliver an entire solution on its own. The aim is for each team to own as much of it as possible, with skills that together cover it, and to keep widening that scope over time.

Essential and Accidental Complexity Some complexity is inherent in the problem and has to be managed. Much of it, however, is accidental: created by the organisation’s own structures, politics, technologies and knowledge silos, and it can be removed. The same holds for dependencies, the structural enemy of adaptivity. Manage the essential ones and eliminate the accidental ones. Each reduction widens what a single team can own from end to end.

Not by Declaration Renaming component teams is not enough, and solution orientation cannot be declared into being. It changes structures and incentives, and the way the work itself is organised becomes something the organisation keeps improving.

Part of a Bigger Picture Solution orientation is one of the four dimensions of an adaptive organisation, together with Fast Improvement Cycles, Organisational Multidexterity 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 5.