Navigate the Swirl. Richard Hawkes

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FIGURE 2.4 The Business Triangle in Action

      Indeed, the Business Triangle provides a model of the business that always keeps serving the target customer's needs as a core objective, and aligning the business social system to work interdependently as the solution path. It sounds simple, but in practice, most organizations struggle to identify problems and resolve gaps in their system of roles fast enough to keep up with the needs of an evolving business. When we have the Business Triangle as a simple, shared language with which to discuss who the target customer is for each type of business capability, and what roles are going to own those capabilities, it becomes so much easier to shorten the distance between a problem or a breakdown and an elegant solution and resolution.

      And, perhaps most importantly, the Business Triangle provides a model for organizing and growing a business that engages the social system and respects people's natural agency. It doesn't try to slot people into a mechanistic process; it allows them to see what they are in together and negotiate their roles within that system. This is essential for successfully navigating the difficult org structure conversations that come up in (and too often derail) any transformational journey. It provides an empowering and liberating shared language that clarifies priorities and reveals possibilities for optimizing how your business creates value as a team. It's visually clarifying. It boils the essential elements of your business down to a system of capabilities and roles, which then sets the stage for mapping and managing all the critical activities in a business through clear accountabilities. In sum, it allows us to model the seeming complexity of everything that goes on in a business. Throughout the journey of growth that we'll be exploring in this book, this model will be an essential tool. It doesn't capture everything about the nature of an organization or enterprise but it is a critical element in the shared language we are developing. As we bring clarity and transparency to the social system of an organization, the confusion of the Swirl recedes, and we set the stage for the crucial conversations that follow.

Now that we've unpacked and modeled the definition of a business, let's turn to a final framing question: What is growth? In terms of the model I've just shared, there's a simple answer: business growth is an acceleration in the velocity of value created around the Business Triangle. Indeed, the throughput around the triangle from Develop, to Sell, to Deliver will determine the speed of growth—for the business or businesses. However, as I've defined it in these pages, an organization is also much more than a business, and one organization can contain many businesses. So if an organization is a complex, adaptive social system and can contain one or more businesses, what does it mean for all of that to grow? And just as important, what might prevent it from doing so?

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