Enterprise Design Patterns | Creations Patterns
#32: Toolkits Sparking Change
"The future of design is giving up control, favouring the flexible over the finished, and providing a space for others to fill with life."
- Milan Guenther
Related Patterns:
#1: Personal Enterprise Vision, #19: Evidence, #34: Tangible Futures
You need to engage many co-creators to contribute to a coherent Enterprise Design.
In this context:
You need to change or rearrange many elements across the enterprise, touching all facets. Designing all the details of such a transformation is impossible as well as futile because you don’t have control over the decisions your co-creators make.
Therefore:
You design tools for others to use. You design these tools to fit together and connect to the overall Enterprise Design, facilitating collaboration across the enterprise. This enables your co-creators to address their own priorities while contributing to a coherent Enterprise Design.
Tools can include:
- Background stories behind the changes your Enterprise Design proposes;
- Principles and standards to guide people;
- Feedback and collaboration channels to inform people of their progress and opportunities for improvement;
- Patterns, reusable components, maps, models, or software tools.
Example: when working on an enterprise-wide product portfolio, you provide a tool for designing business processes that reuse existing processes and fit into your global process architecture, so they automatically contribute to delivering this portfolio.
Consequently:
You find it easier to connect to co-creators, secure their contribution and make actual change happen, because you are making their lives easier. You don't need to define all the details because your tools contain the elements that enable many people to self-organise while working towards a coherent Enterprise Design.