RoundMap® : The Organizational Readiness Matrix™

 

Mastering Business Resilience: The Organizational Readiness Matrix™

The arrival of AI has dramatically reshaped the business landscape, rendering certain skills and processes obsolete almost overnight. AI-enabled companies now run leaner, with lower costs and a level of efficiency that surpasses anything their predecessors could have imagined. Strategies are no longer crafted over weeks but in an instant, and execution follows with unmatched speed and precision.

The need for businesses to adapt has never been more urgent. Yet, many companies are left asking themselves critical questions: Where are we right now? Are we vulnerable in ways we haven’t even realized? Are we listening closely enough to our customers? Are our processes holding us back from reaching our true potential? Are we genuinely sustainable or just paying lip service to the concept? More importantly, are we merely surviving or thriving in this new world?

In this era of relentless change, simply existing is no longer enough. Businesses must challenge themselves with tough questions about their products, value, and future. How can we ensure that we stand the test of time and not just respond to change but embrace and thrive within it? This challenge is the key to thriving in the new world of AI.

The Organizational Readiness Matrix provides wisdom across these worlds, offering a clear blueprint to guide businesses through this new reality. It helps answer these crucial questions and provides the insight necessary to ensure not just survival, but success in a world that won’t wait for anyone to catch up.

Introducing RoundMap's Organizational Readiness Matrix™

The Organizational Readiness Matrix is a strategic tool for assessing the state of a business and determining the necessary shifts to thrive in a constantly changing environment. By integrating the core principles of the Four Pillars and the VEVA model, this matrix offers a comprehensive lens for evaluating organizational readiness, whether it requires more stability, adaptability, or a blend of both, depending on the external and internal conditions.

How the Matrix Was Built

The matrix is founded on two axes:

1. X-Axis: Stability vs. Adaptability
   
   • This axis reflects the tension between building stability (focusing on internal strength and consistency) and adaptability (focusing on external flexibility and market responsiveness). Every organization needs both to survive, but the balance shifts depending on its strategic needs and external pressures.
2. Y-Axis: Internal vs. External Focus
   
   • The vertical axis represents the organization’s primary focus—whether its efforts are directed inward (developing internal capabilities, processes, and people) or outward (responding to market dynamics, stakeholders, and external forces).

The matrix maps four quadrants, each describing a different strategic position based on these two axes. These quadrants allow organizations to evaluate their current position and determine where they need to move to align with their market environment, strategy, or growth phase.

The Four Pillars and VEVA Model as Foundations

The Four Pillars (Bolster Vitality, Design for Impact, Harmonize Strengths, Cultivate Empowerment) provide a stable, foundational framework for long-term organizational health. They emphasize internal alignment, resilience, and the internal systems needed to maintain stability while driving sustainable impact.

The VEVA Model (Versatility, Equitability, Vitality, Agility) adds dynamic, outward-facing principles for responding to change, ensuring organizations can remain agile, equitable, and resilient in fast-moving environments. While some overlap exists, particularly around Vitality, the VEVA model sharpens the focus on adaptability and external responsiveness, providing the ability to pivot and shift quickly.

The Four Quadrants of the Organizational Readiness Matrix

• Foundational Excellence (Internal Stability)
  
  • Key Focus: Internal resilience, structure, and long-term stability.
  • Description: This quadrant is for organizations focused on building strong internal systems, processes, and teams. They emphasize harmonizing internal strengths (e.g., human talent, capabilities) and ensuring vitality through sustainable internal operations. Stability is prioritized to weather predictable changes, ensuring the company has a solid foundation to build on over time.
  • Ideal For: Companies in stable industries, mature markets, or those focused on consistent, controlled growth.
• Sustainable Impact (External Stability)
  
  • Key Focus: External impact with long-term, stable engagement.
  • Description: Businesses in this quadrant focus on maintaining external relationships, meeting stakeholder expectations, and creating sustainable value. Their operations are designed for impact, ensuring they contribute positively to external social and environmental goals. These companies emphasize equitability and sustainability in external engagements without sacrificing internal stability.
  • Ideal For: Organizations driven by corporate responsibility, sustainability goals, or long-term stakeholder relationships in relatively stable market environments.
• Dynamic Agility (Internal Adaptability)
  
  • Key Focus: Agile internal structures and rapid adaptation to internal changes.
  • Description: This quadrant is for organizations focusing on building internal adaptability. Companies prioritize empowerment, versatility, and continuous learning. Their internal structures are flexible, encouraging teams to adapt quickly and solve internal challenges as they arise. This agility fosters innovation and positions the company to evolve even when market conditions remain relatively stable.
  • Ideal For: Startups, rapidly growing companies, or businesses undergoing internal transformation, where innovation and internal agility are critical.
• Market Pioneers (External Adaptability)
  
  • Key Focus: External agility, market responsiveness, and innovation.
  • Description: These businesses thrive on external market change and disruption. They are highly adaptable, continuously evolving to stay ahead of competitors, innovate, and seize new opportunities. Driven by agility, these companies have the resilience to shift gears quickly, making them market pioneers. Their focus on external conditions helps them adapt and leverage changes for growth.
  • Ideal For: Fast-moving industries, emerging markets, and companies focused on rapid innovation or competitive positioning.

Surviving and Thriving with the Organizational Readiness Matrix

To survive and thrive in any market condition, businesses must understand which quadrant they currently occupy and where to shift to remain competitive or grow. Here’s how the Organizational Readiness Matrix can be applied to achieve these goals:

1. Assess the Current Position:
   Evaluate where your organization currently stands on the stability-adaptability and internal-external spectrum. Are you focusing too much on internal processes while the market demands innovation? Or are you responding to external challenges without strengthening your internal systems?

2. Identify the Strategic Needs:
   Determining which quadrant is most suitable depends on your industry, market conditions, and growth goals. Mature markets might require a more stable, internally focused approach, while fast-changing industries require adaptability and external focus.

3. Balance Stability and Adaptability:
   No business can rely solely on stability or adaptability. The Organizational Readiness Matrix allows you to strategically shift focus as needed, balancing foundational strengths with the ability to pivot and respond to changing market dynamics.

4. Implement a Shift in Focus:
   Once you understand your position and needs, implement strategies that move you closer to the quadrant that best aligns with your goals. If you need more internal stability, work on harmonizing strengths and developing sustainable processes. If the market is shifting rapidly, consider building agility and empowering your teams to act on external changes.

The Organizational Readiness Matrix™ as a Tool for Business Resilience

The Organizational Readiness Matrix™ offers a robust framework for understanding where your organization stands and how to shift focus to ensure long-term success. By integrating the Four Pillars’ focus on internal stability with the VEVA model’s emphasis on external adaptability, the matrix covers every angle a business needs to survive and thrive in any market condition.

Whether focused on building resilience through internal alignment or responding to the market’s changing needs, the Organizational Readiness Matrix helps you identify the right balance to ensure continued success, no matter the challenges ahead.

https://tinyurl.com/upxffrtk

Josh Seiden. Outcomes Over Output

 

Review

I have heard many product managers say "outcomes over output," but few have a clear definition of an outcome. Defining an outcome as a change in behaviour that drives business results is key to linking this principle to product practice. It anchors to the core of product management, which is all about the value exchange between customers and the business. The author does an excellent job of taking a great product management principle and almost creating a full-stack product management model based on it. Changes in behaviour are observable and measurable. Customer behaviour can be visualised on a customer journey map. Executives can hold teams accountable for hitting outcomes. Businesses can be transformed by using the same techniques.

Key Takeaways

The 20% that gave me 80% of the value.

• An outcome is a change in behaviour that drives business results
• Don’t focus on your output, focus on outcomes and changing human behaviour
• Features don’t automatically create value → so don’t use them as the centre of your planning process
• Managing outputs → telling a team what to build
• BUT features don’t always deliver value
• Managing impact → telling a team to target some high-level value (growing revenue)
• BUT that’s not specific enough
• Managing outcomes → ask teams to create a specific human behaviour that drives business results
• Gives them room to find the right solution, and keeps them focused on delivering value
• Agile doesn’t tell us what ‘value’ means

When you combine outcome-based targets with a process that’s based on running experiments, you really start to unlock the power of agile approaches.

• Setting outcome goals → gives teams room to try different approaches and experiment
• Think of MVP as the smallest thing you can do (or make) to learn if your hypothesis is correct
• There are only 5 things executives care about (by Jared Spool). These are impact-level metrics
• Increasing revenue
• Decreasing costs
• Increasing new business and market share
• Increasing revenue from existing customers
• Increasing shareholder value
• Finding the right outcome:
• What are the customer behaviours that will drive business results?
• What are the the things customers do that help us predict the thing we care about
• Because outcomes are things people do, they’re observable and measurable. Making them suitable to be used as a management tool
• Understand what your customers are doing that drives the results you care about
• Leading vs Lagging indicators:
• What is a leading indicator?
• Things people are doing (human behaviour)
• They predict the success we’re seeking
• Leading indicators are therefore outcomes
• Hypothesis
• There’s uncertainty when we create outcomes…
• Will the output create the outcome?
• Will the outcome contribute to the impact?
• Treat ideas like assumptions. Express assumptions as hypothesis. Run experiments to test hypothesis.
• Hypothesis: What we believe & the evidence we’re seeking (to know if we’re right or not)
• The Magic Questions
• What are the user and customer behaviours that drive business results?
• How can we get people to do more of those behaviours?
• How do we know that we’re right?
• Tracking progress is easier when teams are working on well defined outcomes and making their hypothesis clear. They are measurable → Are customer behaviours changing?

• Outcomes help you write better OKRs → first consider the business result you’re trying to achieve, express that in easy-to-measure terms of customer behaviour
• Think about your system of outcomes
• Outcome-based roadmaps
• Visualise the customer journey → what are people doing (customer, colleague, other players)
• What behaviours at each step predict success and satisfaction?
• And what behaviours at each step predict failure and dissatisfaction?
• Write down and overlay success factors (boosters) and failure factors (blockers)
• How might we encourage x?
• How might we eliminate issue y?
• Frame as a hypothesis

We believe that if we increase the rate at which buyers and sellers meet early in the process, it will lead to more successful transactions (as measured by X) and higher user satisfaction (as measured by NPS.) We think we can increase the rate of early meetings [with this idea] and [with this idea] and [with this idea.] We will work on testing these ideas in Q1 of the coming year.

• Organisations are often setup in products/channels vs behaviours/customer journeys
• Doing so favours outputs not outcomes
• Teams should be clear about the value they are trying to create. They should specify:
• the outcome they are seeking for the customer or user
• the outcome they are seeking for the business
• If we create this outcome for the user → it will deliver this outcome for the business.
• Product managers should have dedicated teams, else they end up waiting to be allocated a team before they can start work
• If stakeholders have to wait a long time for their project to be approved, they bloat their feature requirements, force everything in they need.

• Companies might have to re-engineer the way they work in order to implement outcomes in their work
• How can we change employee behaviour in a way that generates business results?
• Apply an outcome-based approach to transformation:
1. Your colleagues are your customers
2. Everything is an outcome
3. Everything is an experiment
• Take a customer-centric approach with your colleagues
• What are their goals? What value can you offer to them in order to get them to “buy” the change you are selling?
• Frame organisational change initiatives in terms of outcomes.
• What are the new behaviours you want to create in the organisation?
• What will people be doing differently when your change program is successful?

Deep Summary

Longer form notes, typically condensed, reworded and de-duplicated.

1. What are outcomes?

• An outcome is a change in behaviour that drives business results
• Don’t focus on your output (what you’re building), focus on outcomes and changing human behaviour
• Don’t confuse shipping features with being done
• Software isn’t like building a bridge. It’s harder to decide when it’s done.

The Planning Process

• Features don’t automatically create value → so don’t use them as the centre of your planning process
• Instead think about building as little as possible (as few features as possible) to achieve the outcome you seek.
• Resources → Activities → Outputs → Outcomes → Impact
• Managing outputs → telling a team what to build
• BUT features don’t always deliver value
• Managing impact → telling a team to target some high-level value (growing revenue)
• BUT that’s not specific enough
• Managing outcomes → ask teams to create a specific human behaviour that drives business results (DO THIS)
• gives them room to find the right solution, and keeps them focused on delivering value
• specific, small, measurable changes in human behaviour
• Agile tells us we should deliver value early. But it doesn’t tell us how or what ‘value’ means.
• If an outcome is a change in behaviour that drives business results, ask yourself:
• What is the human behaviour change that we are looking for?
• Outcomes, Experiments, Hypothesis and MVPs
• Q: How can we be sure what we’re making is going to deliver value?
• A: You can’t always know in advance, so you need to experiment.
• Unlock the power of agile by combining outcome-based targets: with a process that is based on running experiments. This works really well in situations of high uncertainty.

When you combine outcome-based targets with a process that’s based on running experiments, you really start to unlock the power of agile approaches.

• Setting outcome goals → gives teams room to try different approaches and experiment
• Think of agile as a series of experiments and hypothesis, all designed to achieve an outcome
• Think of MVP as the smallest thing you can do (or make) to learn if your hypothesis is correct

2. Using outcomes

• There are only 5 things executives care about (by Jared Spool)
• Increasing revenue
• Decreasing costs
• Increasing new business and market share
• Increasing revenue from existing customers
• Increasing shareholder value
• These are high-level or impact metrics
• Executives need to bread down ‘increase revenue’ into something their teams can work on. They should be talking outcomes not impacts.
• Impacts are the sum of a whole lot of outcomes (human behaviours that drive business results)
• Finding the right outcome:
• What are the customer behaviours that will drive business results?
• What are the the things customers do that help us predict the thing we care about
• Because outcomes are things people do, they’re observable and measurable. Making them suitable to be used as a management tool
• Understand what your customers are doing that drives the results you care about
• Leading vs Lagging indivators:
• What is a leading indicator?
• Things people are doing (human behaviour)
• They predict the success we’re seeking
• Leading indicators are therefore outcomes (change in behaviour → business results)
• Hypothesis
• There’s uncertainty when we create outcomes…
• Will the output create the outcome?
• Will the outcome contribute to the impact?
• Treat ideas like assumptions. Express assumptions as hypothesis. Run experiments to test hypothesis.
• Hypothesis: What we believe & the evidence we’re seeking (to know if we’re right or not)
• Experiments and MVPs:
• What can we do to figure out if this hypothesis is true?
• How do we know if we’re right?

• The Magic Questions
• What are the user and customer behaviours that drive business results?
• How can we get people to do more of those behaviours?
• How do we know that we’re right?

• Tracking progress with outcomes
• Impact: reduce costs
• Outcome: fewer people calling tech support
• Output: improved usability of confusing features
• Tracking progress is easier when teams are working on well defined outcomes and making their hypothesis clear. They are measurable → Are customer behaviours changing?

• How to start… Ask… What (user / employee / customer) behaviours has this initiative created that are driving business results?
• Move conversations away from features and reorient toward value delivery
• Write better OKRs with outcomes →
• The point of OKRs is to make you think critically about what you’re working on
• Outcomes help you write better OKRs → first consider the business result you’re trying to achieve, express that in easy-to-measure terms of customer behaviour

3. Outcomes-based planning

• When you start to string outcomes together, you have to be honest about what we know and what we don’t know
• Think about your system of outcomes
• Outcome-based roadmaps

Visualise the customer journey → what are people doing (customer, colleague, other players)

• A customer journey visualises behaviour
• Remember… outcomes are behaviours that drive business results
• Helps you see what behaviours you want to encourage, eliminate or that might be missing
• Customer journey map → the behaviours of the people and systems that make up the experience
• Boosters and Blockers
• What behaviours at each step predict success and satisfaction?
• And what behaviours at each step predict failure and dissatisfaction?
• Write down and overlay success factors (boosters) and failure factors (blockers)
• How might we encourage x?
• How might we eliminate issue y?
• Frame as a hypothesis

We believe that if we increase the rate at which buyers and sellers meet early in the process, it will lead to more successful transactions (as measured by X) and higher user satisfaction (as measured by NPS.) We think we can increase the rate of early meetings [with this idea] and [with this idea] and [with this idea.] We will work on testing these ideas in Q1 of the coming year.

• Use the same method for impact level targets too..
• Asked to increase sales? Create a customer journey map, and then review it with the magic question: “what are the behaviours in the system that predict higher sales, and how can we go about encouraging those behaviours?”

4. Organising for outcomes

• Organisations are often setup in products/channels vs behaviours/customer journeys
• Doing so favours outputs not outcomes
• What is the better project name:
• A: Product details page re-design
• B: Boost sales by 10% from the product details page
• How to re-organise product teams around outcomes
• Teams should be clear about the value they are trying to create. They should specify:
• the outcome they are seeking for the customer or user
• the outcome they are seeking for the business
• If we create this outcome for the user → it will deliver this outcome for the business.
• Product managers should have dedicated teams, else they end up waiting to be allocated a team before they can start work
• If stakeholders have to wait a long time for their project to be approved, they bloat their feature requirements, force everything in they need.
• Requests get larger → waits to start projects get longer → requests get larger … etc
• Shift the focus, get the company to step back, not to focus on features, but on the business problems you need to solve
• Outcomes are more abstract that outputs (which are more concrete). You’re not sure what the team is going to work on (which can be scary). Giving up control.

5. Outcomes for Transformation

• Companies might have to re-engineer the way they work in order to implement outcomes in their work
• You can apply the same techniques to think about organisation transformation…
• How can we change employee behaviour in a way that generates business results?
• Apply an outcome-based approach to transformation:
1. Your colleagues are your customers
2. Everything is an outcome
3. Everything is an experiment
• What happens if we think of these leaders as our customers?
• What mix of policy and action could we put in place to get them aligned?
• What change in behaviour on the part of the leaders could we observe to see if we’ve succeeded?
• e.g. We want our leaders to recite our strategy in 3 bullet points
• Take a customer-centric approach with your colleagues
• What are their goals? What value can you offer to them in order to get them to “buy” the change you are selling?
• Frame organisational change initiatives in terms of outcomes.
• What are the new behaviours you want to create in the organisation?
• What will people be doing differently when your change program is successful?

https://tinyurl.com/2n7wvf3k

This is an important read for Product Managers especially. A great tool to include in your mental tool kit. Here are my notes:

This book coaches us to Think and Lead our teams by Outcomes inorder to focus on customer behaviors that bring business results, as well as meaningful transformations in any organization.

What is an Outcome?
An Outcome is a change in customer behavior that drives business results.

What is the outcome that your business seeks?
To reiterate….an Outcome is a change in customer behavior that drives business results. What is then the Customer Behavior Change that we are looking for?

Lets talk about what are the most common ways in which we think and lead our teams.

Distinguishing between Leading by Outputs vs Impacts vs Outcomes

Leading by Outputs: Manage the team by telling them what to make. This isn’t the best way because features don’t guarantee to deliver value.

Leading by Impact: Ask the team to deliver high level value by increasing the revenue. This isn’t very specific enough.

Leading by Outcomes: Ask teams to create a specific customer behavior that drives business results. That allows them to find the right solution and keeps them focused on delivering value.

What is the outcome that your business seeks?
We know, an Outcome is a change in customer behavior that drives business results. This than brings us to a very important question. What is the Customer Behavior Change that we are looking for?

When to use an Outcome based Approach?

When there is an uncertainty around a new initiative/product/feature. Will our new product release make customers happier? Is it going to have the desired result for our business? As PM’s, at the beginning of any initiative, most often than not, we are starting out on things that have a high degree of uncertainty.

When teams are facing this kind of uncertainty, outcomes are a great way to set goals because they allow teams to experiment, to try different solutions until they hit on the one that works.

When NOT to use an Outcome based Approach?
For Operations for example, that ensure the day to day functioning of the business is fine. Here when you have a high degree of confidence that the solution will work, the outcome based approach is less useful. Planning with outputs is appropriate.

And the Companion tool of an Outcome Based Approach is…
Experimentation!

When you combine outcome-based targets with a process thats based on running experiments, you really start to unlock the power of agile approaches.

Think of agile projects as a series of hypotheses and experiments, all designed to achieve an outcome.

Ask this question over and over again…”What could we do to deliver value early?”

Combining experiments with outcomes is really a powerful way to work, especially in situations of high uncertainty.

When you plan work in this way, a combination of outcome goals and experiments, you give yourself and your team the permission to go after a meaningful business goal, and you give people the freedom to experiment their way forward even when the way forward is not clear.

To figure out if your outputs create the outcomes you seek, you need to test and run experiments. MVP is a buzzword that means experiment.

Which Outcomes to work on first?
To find the right outcomes to work on, we start with a simple question: ‘What are the customer behaviors that drive business results?’

These are Magic questions!

• What are the user and customer behaviors that drive business results?
• How can we get people to do more of those behaviors?
• How do we know we’re right?

Outcome based Roadmaps

Use Outcomes (not features) to plan initiatives. Ask ‘what new behaviors will this initiative create that will deliver business value? How can we deliver that value sooner?

Plan around themes of work, problems to solve or outcomes to deliver

Chaitan

https://tinyurl.com/4xd9fvpc