Platforming Inside and Between Organizations: differentiation, scale, and scope— with Jabe Bloom

Podcast Notes

Today’s guest is Jabe Bloom — in conversation with Simone Cicero and Emanuele Quintarelli, Boundaryless’ EEEO Micro Enterprise Lead.

With Jabe, we look into how, increasingly in an age of technologically powered organizations, thriving means the ability to enable “the three economies” of differentiation, scale and scope at the same time. The key question is: what’s the role of platforms and ecosystems in this shift?

During the chat we explore topics such as managing organizational commons, ensuring continuity between the organization and its ecosystem, decentralizing information, sympoietic versus autopoietic systems, maneuver warfare theory, cosmopolitan localism, the role of social practice and methodologies in institutional innovation and so much more. We focus on the interplay between these trends and organizational development.

Jabe Bloom is part of Red Hat’s Global Transformation Office, where he services as a senior director. He has been working to explore the complex interactions between design, innovation, development, and operational excellence in organizations for more than 20 years. Jabe is currently writing his dissertation in pursuit of a Ph.D. in Design Studies at Carnegie Mellon University (PA) — his research focuses on the field of Transition Design and informs an ongoing exploration of the practice of design and strategy with a select group of international clients.

Tune in to this informative conversation as we learn more about Jabe’s research, and his theories on organisational design and platform thinking.

Remember that you can always find transcripts and key highlights of the episode on our Medium publication:

To find out more about Jabe’s work:

• Website: http://blog.jabebloom.com/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/cyetain
• Red Hat: https://www.redhat.com/en

Other references and mentions:

• Herbert Simon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_A._Simon
• Paul Lawrence and Jay Lorsch, Organization and Environment: Managing Differentiation and Integration, 1968: https://www.amazon.com/Organization-Environment-Managing-Differentiation-Integration/dp/0875841295
• Bruno Latour: http://www.bruno-latour.fr/index-2.html
• Elinor Ostrom: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elinor_Ostrom

Find out more about the show and the research at Boundaryless at  https://boundaryless.io/resources/podcast/

Thanks for the ad-hoc music to Liosound / Walter Mobilio. Find his portfolio here: www.platformdesigntoolkit.com/music

Recorded on 9 April 2021.

Key Insights

1. The “Three Economies Theory” outlines how organizations ought to think about economies of differentiation, scale, and scope — all serving different, and sometimes poorly understood, purposes. While differentiation enables product thinking and serving niche markets (increased variety), economies of scale are expressed through standardized production of consumable resources and reduced variation (as opposed to variety). In the scope economy, Jabe puts forward the idea of a third economic logic that is around creating and managing organizational commons: scope economies. In Jabe’s words, scope economies are about “creating a platform in which the design activities become primarily about reconfiguration […] and the ability to reconfigure components to create value in a niche enabling the differentiation economies”.

•  Listen to Jabe’s three economies theory from minute 5:06

2. “Designerly service design” — as put forward by Jabe — is where “the customer has to perform part of the activity in order to become part of the value stream themselves”. The final configuration is thus deferred until a “customer explains how they would like their configuration to work so that it’s maximally satisfying to them”. In this view, platforming becomes the process of optimizing both social and technical aspects of a system into a platform: we end up at the intersection of organizational design, software architecture or software theory.

•  Listen to Jabe explaining his take on “Designerly Service Design” and platforming from minute 14:57 .

3. Inside of organizations, platforming is becoming increasingly more important as marketplaces become more complex, forcing organizations to face new types of issues. What many organizations get “wrong” is to look at the economic logic of differentiation, scale and scope as being equal, while they should be seen as differentiated. Scale, for instance, tends to be more cyclical, while differentiation is — as Jabe puts it — “actually chaotic” and “has to do with being able to react to market opportunities that do not present themselves on cycles, but instead may emerge from dynamics in the marketplace”. What platforms can provide is an “isolation” of the cycle times, what Jabe refers to as “platform as an interface”.

•  Continue to listen to the discussion on platforming inside organisations from Emanuele’s question from minute 24:32.

? Boundaryless Conversations Podcast is about exploring the future of organizing at scale by leveraging on technology, network effects, and shaping narratives. We explore how platforms can help us play with a world in turmoil, change, and transformation: a world that is at the same time more interconnected and interdependent than ever but also more conflictual and rivalrous.