← Portfolio · ← Collaboration 2.0
4.2 · The phased strategy
Collaboration 2.0 was one part of a wider proposed strategy, laid out over roughly 24 months in three overlapping tracks (Figure 7).
Figure 7 — the proposed 24-month strategy. Three overlapping tracks — immediate actions, cultural change, and portfolio governance — with a fourth band for what comes afterward. Each bar runs from the month it starts to the month it ends. This is rebuilt from the original roadmap slide rather than copied from it. The slide’s horizontal axis is only marked at 6, 9, 21, 24 and “afterward”, so the bar positions in the cultural-change track are inferred from where they sat left to right.
Phase 1 — immediate actions (months 1–6). Four moves at once:
- Explain the grand strategy to group-level leadership, and get four things agreed explicitly: trust, freedom, support and coordination. Everything else depends on them. The strategy names what it depends on instead of assuming it.
- Set up Collaboration 2.0 as a workflow with five declared properties: transparency, accountability, wide communication, decision review, common agreement.
- Run an urgent diagnostic of the portfolio and the finances, to produce what is needed for survival and for the next roadmap.
- Invest in a market and business strategy team that is held accountable, and stand up a crisis governance committee.
The fourth move looks like ordinary corporate housekeeping. It is not.
The diagnosis found that the strategy-and-market cluster is less a set of failures than a set of vacancies. The parent organisation was built for work where the customer was known in advance and the requirement came from outside. It never needed a function that discovers what to build, so it never built one. And it had no way to notice the gap, because you cannot miss something you have never had a reason to want (1.2).
You cannot repair a missing capability with a workflow, because there is no existing activity to rewrite. You have to hire for it. That is the one part of this strategy the PRD wedge could never have reached, under any design.
What that team is for, and what it is not for. The point was never to hand the question of what should we build over to them. Companies are rarely lucky enough to find the person who can tell them the magic secret — build this and you will make a lot of money. What people with that background can do is give a professional structure to the arguments about the market, coach everyone who wants to contribute to the question of what should be built, and assess the proposals individuals bring.
Phase 2 — cultural change (months ~6–21). Feedback on Collaboration 2.0, and refinement of it. Building up experience of things going well, and confidence with it. Brand and reputation. Market feedback. Development driven by the market. Strategic repositioning.
The claim behind that order is that culture follows demonstrated success, not the other way round. It is the same causal direction as 2.3.2, applied to the whole programme instead of to one document.
Phase 3 — afterward (months 21+). Toward a self-organized system, “Collaboration 3.0”, and financial stability.
The end state is the framework becoming unnecessary as an imposed structure. The introduction letter states the goal plainly: people reach sound decisions together and approve them without conflict, automatically and in a distributed way, with the system design team watching rather than deciding. 2.7 is where that end state is worked out.
Why the strategy is part of this at all
Being a strategy designer has never been my goal. I do not consider myself qualified to propose a strategy for an organization of a hundred people, least of all one with a horizon of two years or more. Collaboration 2.0 is what forced it. The framework cannot be operationalized without a strategy, so proposing the framework meant sketching a rough one at ground level — and leaving it open on purpose to objection, critique and revision by other members of the group and by other managers.
The direction here also runs the opposite way from how it looks. The strategy was not the starting point with Collaboration 2.0 slotted underneath it. Collaboration 2.0 has a lifecycle of its own: gather feedback from employees, watch the KPIs, adjust the framework and its tools. That same loop was meant to be built into the strategy, so the strategy could keep adjusting instead of standing as a fixed two-year plan.
I did not spend a great deal of time on the strategy planning, and I am not presenting it as the strong part of the work. It had to be here for one more reason.
The strategy is the bigger picture. It shows the intervals at which income is expected — real feedback on software that actually shipped — which is what would let the company move on the basis of effectuation and the voice of the market, rather than on the basis of my idea has to work.
It is also where the complex-systems perspective is applied to the intervention itself. If the company does not succeed, Collaboration 2.0 does not succeed either. And that failure ends in the disappointment of the employees — the people 4.1 shows are the important asset, and the ones easiest to forget.
So Collaboration 2.0 needs a bigger ecosystem to live in, and it is also expected to contribute to creating that ecosystem.
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