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Enterprise Design Cheat Sheet

18 Jan, 2022
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The trends relevant for organisations for the next few years will be (1) resilience and (2) human-centric. These two topics will result in impactful change in most organisations. As support for this change I want to share my Enterprise Design Cheatsheet with you.

The Enterprise Design Cheat Sheet can be downloaded at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5884550 as PDF.

Advising change

When I talk to people about their desire to change their organisation, I ask questions.
These questions are usually “Can you tell me more?” and “Why is this important to you?”

To give a direction to change, you need to know where your due North is. You need to have a stable foundation in your why before proceeding in change and execution.

To find this stable point I use the models in this document. A conversation starts with, for example “I want to improve the security of my company.” I then find out which concept of security is relevant to this question and why this urge to change is present. When the why is clear, we start the journey to the aspects related to this why.

The same journey is there when I advice people in starting their new business, or reorganising their existing business.

When you (re-)start a team it is essential to find the purpose that binds the team-members. For a team to perform optimally you need to establish psychological safety for the team-members.

To discover where we stand and what is our stable point I facilitate by going through the models in this document. Enjoy reading, and please let me know how it can be improved.

The Enterprise Design Cheat Sheet can be downloaded at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5884550 as PDF.

The trends are resilience and human-centric.

Change

Obviously, introducing the cheatsheet is one thing. But why is change so evident? Why would resilience and human-centrism lead to change?

Resilience

Most organisations completed their first digital transformation due to the COVID pandemic. The pandemic showed that organisations need to be resilient against (future) crisis. Next, this transformation itself increased the unpredictability of value chains and markets due to the the increased digital nature of the connection between organisations. To deal with this increased (objective) chaos organisations need to become resilient.

Human-Centric

The same pandemic shows another important theme: As an organisation it is important to be human-centric. This is fueled by the combination of increased physical distance between people in your organization, reducing the “tribe feeling” and “common goal” as glue. Next to that, the impact of changing your employer has reduced when you work from home while the war for talent has intensified. And thirdly a mitigation to deal with the increased unpredictability is to provide people with knowledge and experiences to reduce their subjective perception of chaos.

Change your mental model

Organisational Change

The reality I describe results in organisations primary action to stay relevant is to reconfigure themselves to optimize their level of resilience and achieve a fitting level of human-centric in their organisation.

Over the years I have collected models that have proven themselves in value and support. I selected models that support each other and can be used together. You can just “wing” it when transforming your organisation, or you can use existing models as a stepping stone.

Cheat Sheet

The goal of this Enterprise Design Cheat Sheet is to be a comprehensive summary of steps and concepts needed to create a company from scratch or for an existing company to kickstart an essential transformation. The content applies to start-ups, scale-ups and existing (multi-national) organisations and companies.

PDF

This and new versions are available in PDF via Zenodo https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5884550 (v1.2) and the link on this page will update in the future accordingly.

This document will continuously be updated since it is a summary of available knowledge and that source is fast and infinite.

I hope you enjoy the content of this document and provide some inspiration to investigate one or more aspects of your transformation. You are welcome to contact me to discuss the content and reflect on it. Best to you.

 

Enjoy your day, Edzo

Many thanks to Jeroen Willemsen for his editorial powers!

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Sharing Knowledge

Xebia’s core values are: People First, Sharing Knowledge, Quality without Compromise and Customer Intimacy. That is why this blog entry is published under the License of Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0

The Enterprise Design Cheat Sheet document is created by me (@edzob) and published under the creative commons BY-SA 4.0 license. The content is a summary of available and open knowledge. Feedback is welcome.

The source of this document is being transferred from google docs to Gitlab as an open repository: https://gitlab.com/edzob/enterprise-design-cheat-sheet Help in this is really appreciated!

Header Photo by Priscilla Gyamfi on Unsplash

resilience and human-centric Photo by Drop the Label Movement on Unsplash

Mental model Photo by Thought Catalog on Unsplash

Edzo Botjes
Antifragility Architect & Variety Engineer at Xebia. A Shrek look a like. Loves Coffee, Food, Roadtripping & Zen. ENFP-T. Phd candidate for resilient information security and governance. edzob @ Signal, Linkedin, WWW, Medium, Riot/Matrix, Wire, Telegram
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