Design For Ecosystems: Continuous Co-Creation
Platforms narratives: a mix of Owners Vision & Participants Interactions
A few days ago, my friend Ron, brought to my attention a concept from Jean de La Rochebrochard: the Narrative — Primitive — Enablers triad.
In the excellent, and short, post mentioned above, La Rochebrochard talks about his experience in evaluating end-user facing products and proposes this “framework” as a way to understand better the basics of the experience that makes the product itself.
Narrative — Primitive — Enablers
In the excellent condensation from Ron, La Rochebrochard thesis boils down to the conclusion that every product is characterized by:
- the NARRATIVE, the profound, authentic and sustainable behavior of users on which the experience is built;
- the PRIMITIVE, the core, simple, and self-sufficient means for users to be able to express themselves within the narrative.
- the ENABLERS, the Primitive’s complement to enhance, strengthen and amplify the users’ expression within the narrative.
Looking at products — and I would say, more in general, experiences — with this lens, one can easily make a parallel with the Transaction Engine / Learning & Improvement Engine duality embedded in the Platform Design Toolkit, and I’ll briefly explain how.
The Narrative (of expanded opportunity)
The concept of the Narrative highly resonates with the idea of a platform as a narrative of expanded opportunities, as John Hagel led us to consider. A platform strategy is a shaping strategy: to pull participants to join, it needs to bring a positive message, a promise of giving an advantage to those that decide to participate to the new, shared, context instead of playing outside.
In collaborative systems — the ones we want to design — the narrative is mainly made of the mix of the different Value Propositions (being a multi sided system a platform strategy always has multi sided VPs): VPs always reflect the elements of the culture and the set of rules, languages and protocols that allow interactions to emerge.
The Primitives: Trading Value with Others
When it comes to the Primitive, La Rochebrochard makes the examples of elementary actions that characterize how you interact with the product: for example “the Primitive of Tinder is the swipe & match, Snap is the instant camera, Zenly is the map.”
My reflection here is that — when instead of dealing with industrial products (pipelines), you deal with collaborative value production systems (platforms) — the primitive is normally made of what we call the transactions engine.
In platform strategies, interactions and transactions are essentially made possible by a working set of channels and contexts. Platform owners build and evolve them to allow participants to “express themselves” in the ecosystem: in multi sided platforms, this normally means trading value (products, services, information) in a marketplace.
Every networked organization (platform) needs to acknowledge that — as the potential grows exponentially at the edge of the system — products and services should not be meant to be provided in centralized manner but, instead, the role of the platform owner is to make the trade easier between producers and consumers, by building a facilitated context made of channels, language and protocols (currencies, shared rules).
The Enablers: how the Platform supports the Participants
Finally, looking at the Enablers as “the Primitive’s complement to enhance,
strengthen and amplify the users’ expression within the narrative” it’s very tempting to consider them as embodied by the platform’s learning engine.
In Platform Design Toolkit framework, the Learning and Improvement Engine is understood as all the services provided by the platform owner to the ecosystem, to support quality improvement, learning, and new capabilities honing. This engine is seen as the main way to strengthen the participant expression within the platform narrative. As a complement to the learning engine, network effects can be also seen as the key amplification mean: our way to look at the true platform meaning has always been about giving participants amplification of potential thanks to a shared context where they can reach more of the others.
Platforms are in continuous co-creation between Owners and Participants
If one wants to understand platforms deeply, she need to understand that the main difference between product experiences and platform experiences relates with the fact that the latter are produced by a collaboration between platform owners (designers, inspirators, shapers) and participants.
It’s essential to understand that, when building platform strategies, is not enough to focus on building elements that can be recombined (this is what infrastructures normally do) or create centrally provided services (this is what industrial service providers do).
If you want to build real platforms you need to focus in:
- creating context where interactions and relationships can flourish,
- combine interactions with the services you provide, in certain specific moments.
If you want to really explore the potential of platforms, you need to focus on relationships and interactions between users, not only on the services you provide.
There are two major motivations why relationship-interactions are essential in platform thinking.
Self Organization is cheaper than Mass Customization
First of all, as we always say, the cost of enabling self-organization is lower than the cost of providing mass customization: we live in the age of the long tail, users are expecting the possibility to have experiences that are specific and personal, highly customized.
The cost of enabling self-organization is lower than the cost of providing mass customization.
Think of traveling with Airbnb in a City. The level of customization in terms, for example, of location choice and characteristics of the home or room I’m going to book are relevantly higher than those I can get from a hotel chain: I can book a house near to my sister’s house, I can book a house with three rooms for my large family and, maybe, a house in a building with an elevator, since I’m traveling with a baby stroller. In a a platform strategy for improving sales (like the one we previously described here) as a business development manager I’ll be able to find the right niche expertise in my company to support me in a pre-sales meeting with a challenging customer.
Platforms are all about enabling niche markets to thrive in the Long Tail through relationship-centric personalization.
Providing this level of personalization with an industrial approach can be daunting, and bears costs that are sensibly higher than the economic opportunity related to the single customer: think if Apple had to hire developers to develop all the magnificent diversity of apps available on the app store, or think of Spotify centrally recording albums for all the artists you can find over there. Simply impossible.
By allowing the system to interact, and self organize products and services at the edge, platforms make possible certain experiences that wouldn’t be possible otherwise.
Relationships are spaces to Grow and Learn
A further motivation why relationship-interactions are central in platform thinking is the potential they have to make participants evolve.
In his amazing post “Beyond Safe Spaces”, Richard D. Bartlett, effectively describes relationships as spaces where:
“almost immediately I start to trust you. The more trust we share, the more intimate and vulnerable we can be together. Within these intimate spaces, I’m most able to change, to heal from trauma, to learn from different experiences, to let go of out-of-date ideas, to imagine a different world than the one I know.”
It’s really essential to understand how powerful is for a brand, organization or strategy to generate a growing number of such spaces: when participants find each other in a peer to peer (entity to entity, not necessary individuals) relationship context, magic things happen.
I always remember my trip in Tel Aviv. During that trip I met the best Airbnb host I ever met through the platform: Eyal not only hosted us in great terrace room just on top of his family’s apartment, but invited us to spend time out in the night — dancing and drinking a few beers — and also hanging out together at the sea, besides caring so much for us to experience all the best restaurants in the area.
Similarly, a platform strategy that is designed to connect two businesses, in an innovation program — say, a startup and a business unit in a large corporation — can generate so many insights from both sides, one side bringing leaner and fastest approaches to innovation, the other bringing insights on distributing, scaling and complying with regulatory requirements and KYC. Both sides grow, experience greatness and build strong trust.
When you’re in my house, I expect you to make an effort to conform to “how we do things around here”, and in return, I will make an effort to make you as comfortable as possible.
(still from Beyond Safe Spaces)
A continuously Co-Created Narrative
The fascinating aspect of Platforms and Ecosystems is that the narrative, “the profound, authentic and sustainable behavior of users” that generates the experience is a result of continuous co-creation.
Platform experiences (a concept we presented widely here and here) are indeed always an integration of:
- elements that platform owners provide in the form of features, services,
- interactions between entities in the ecosystem, provided in peer to peer relationship.
This makes the whole vision a mix of owners (shapers) vision and emergent vision, continuously co-created by users, in the relationships that happen at the edge of the system, where producers and consumers self organize to serve each other and learn from each other what’s needed, what’s appreciated and what’s important.
Platform Design Thinking as a way to think more Systemically
Embracing platform design thinking — by using our tools or others’— is a way to create systems that continuously incorporate more points of view. These systems allow you, as a founder, shaper or organizer, to act more wisely, and to aim for higher impacts on ecosystems and — at some point —on broader ecologies.
As Daniel Christian Wahl wrote a few days ago, we need to think and act more systemically, because:
“whole-systems thinking allows us to co-create rich pictures […] which can accommodate multiple points of view. Mapping the diversity of perspectives and insights […] helps to make it possible for us to act more wisely in the face of uncertainty and in front of the limits of our knowing.”
and, if we do that:
“we will innovate more appropriately […] in order to integrate ecological, social and economic concerns into solutions that are good for people, planet and shared prosperity.”
We’re sure that Platform Design Toolkit will be a precious resource, for all of you interested in doing this: exploring how to design relational systems, that are able to co-evolve towards wiser outcomes.
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Cover Photo by Olga Guryanova on Unsplash
