The design and redesign of organizations today more regularly pursues agility, but very often it thinks that a given model will cause it, rather than discovering its best model from knowing what agility needs. This discussion surveys the underpinning archihtecture of agility, from which to cultivate or discover a site's appropriate model(s).

1. Organizing Agility
An architecture of on-demand co-operation

2. The Beautiful Game
Anyone who has watched a world
class soccer team in a game is
familiar with the ongoing
challenge throughout the game.
The team mainly holds a formation
that consists of players in roles and
positions, making all of them
significantly predictable to each
other.
That predictability persists even
though the competitors constantly
affect and alter what specific
challenge will be thrown at them,
and where, and when, and why.
Each role has a reasonable
expectation of what the other roles
will try to offer.
When the burden of action is on one
role the others immediately adjust
to either take advantage of that
player’s next action, or to lower the
risk that it may create.
The “organization” of the team is
actually constantly varying, within a
“boundary” that exists almost
entirely due to rules and probability
constraining interactions.
A third critical influence is accurately
identified as the motivation that the
player has for using the role in a
given way under demand and within
those constraints above.

3. Built to change for action
The above description indicates the
basic difference between the verb
organization and the noun
organization: it is mainly the
difference between cause and effect.
The main challenge of addressing the
current pace of change is the diversity
of possible incoming demand –
challenging the probability that
existing operations fit an incoming
and new immediate need effectively.
Intentional activity is generating an
effect all during its course of action,
but the structuring of the activity
predisposes the likelihood of the
desired eventual effect occurring.
Interim effects – those generated by
the activity prior to the “arrival” of
finality – serve many different
purposes, including fortifying the
continuation of the activity for final
effect.
Every entity called “organization” has,
regardless of its size, that same
feature in common – a reliance on a
dynamic structure to achieve effect.

4. Organizing agility
Agility is concerned with relevant
impact as a final effect, and with on-
demand alignment within dynamic
structure as an organization.
Dynamic structure is a set of stable
live interactions between
components.
On-demand interactions rely on some
predictability of compatible
contributing actors.
While some change is analytically
predictable, the unpredicted calls for an
ability to rapidly discover and coordinate
relevant contributors to a pattern of
effective activity, under appropriate
prioritization.
Knowing what makes a contributor
relevant and how it can be coordinated
with others allows the dynamic structure
to be designed, resourced, and recruited
when requested.
In other words, the preparation is a system
of services. Structural preparation for
agility focuses on what makes ongoing co-
operation of included actors both effective
and versatile.

5. Immediate relevance on demand
No one controls the pace of change
outside of an organization.
Change, for many reasons or causes,
occurs in many different types, and
each type may vary in its own speed
or frequency.
Agility is simply the attribute of being
able to actively adjust to an emerged
requirement so as to be relevant at
the moment of the requirement’s
demand.
Having that ability will ideally be a
function of structural preparations.
The elements of a timely relevant
response differ in their specific details
from one episode to another.
• responsibility, resources, actions, and
directions.
But architecturally they are a set of
known attributes of components that
combine to generate an impact that is
relevant and therefore “valuable”
The elements are typically “incorporated”
in an organization under “management”,
respectively as authority, assets,
capabilities, and goals.
Those are readily combined and
incorporated as unit components of
response – Roles.

6. Role under cultivation by management
responsibility,
resources,
actions,
and directions
Role: a component of
response that combines
with others to generate
an impact that is
immediately relevant and
therefore “valuable”.
In practice, the actor in
the role also brings a
motivation for using the
role in a certain way.
A given role can include
one or more individuals
who subscribe to its
responsibility and act
together to assure it.
©2020 Malcolm Ryder / Archestra Research

7. Distributing capability for agility
Agility is a characteristic that may be a
desired future state of operability, yet not
part of its current reality.
Changing from not having agility to having
it is a potentially existential mandate for an
organization.
Management’s own essential role in agility
is to use the incorporation of those
components of response to enable a fit to
purpose under the immediate
circumstances of demand.
Any Role is capable of contributing
effectively if, for the instance of demand,
its actor brings motivation, awareness,
and behavior that are compatible with
the requirements of the demand.
One or more different individuals may
act together to make a role perform.
A given actor may work in more than one
role.
The on-demand composition of role
interactions is enabled and constrained
by what drives availability of compatible
actors.
Networking is the predominant example
of a system that supports this aspect of
generating a dynamic structure.

8. Distributing responsibility for agility
Agility is a variable.
At any point within a coordinated response,
agility will be true to some greater or lesser
degree, and will be facilitating some type of
response.
The types can be expressed by differences
in scope and in scale.
Among those distinctions, agility pertains
differently to the critical contribution
needed from a Role at different
intersections of scope and scale.
For example:
Concepts in and about markets must
arise from somewhere, and the
business should be able to assign
responsibility for that to a Role.
Likewise, a Role will have
responsibility for creating an
associated business specification
worth investment, supporting the
concept that arises above.
Another role will identify what should
be developed by the organization to
realize the above business
specification.

9. Culture as a resource for agility
Agreement
Culture, as a practical influencer, is the
real-world exercising of a model of
values mainly comprising benefit and
risk of participation.
This model stresses the correspondence
of three types of rules: communication,
activity, and responsibility.
Culture stipulates value but is constantly
tested, by personal actual experience,
for its reliability – especially for the
credibility of its support and for the
consistency of its outcomes.
Cultural validity is vulnerable to two
demotivating experiences in particular:
exclusions, and failed expectations.
This makes transparency, access, and
inclusion critical success factors for a
contributor’s acceptance of a role.
accountable
available
supportable
INCLUSION
©2020 Malcolm Ryder / Archestra Research

10. A framework of response across scale and scope
Our example exposes three scales
of environmental structures, as
three levels of impacts which are
also logically interdependent.
In that set of relationships, a given
single strategic concept for a
market can be addressed by many
different businesses, and a given
single business may be realized
through many different kinds of an
organization’s developments.
The tiered enablement shows that
something can change on any level,
and that the change can precipitate
a different demand on (or possible
need for adjustment in) other
levels.
There is also the distinction of scopes of
responsibilities for generating appropriate
response to demands. This means providing
options, to support opportunities, for executing
active engagement in place. An engagement can
be addressed by various opportunities, and an
opportunity can be address by various options.
Selectivity aligns them to each other.
Timely, relevant, intentional self-adjustment is the
basic characteristic of agility.
The importance of that characteristic is in the
value it creates: the value of agility is as a
precondition of what needs to come next – timely
effective response.
In the architecture of agility, roles serve each other
on request, through advertised types of
interaction, to co-operatively generate alignment
of contributions to response on demand.

11. Develop Provide Implement
Conceive Produce Deliver
Create Align Target
Market View
Business View
Organiz’n View
SERVICE-ORIENTED AGILITY ENABLES ON-DEMAND FIT-TO-PURPOSE
strategy
Options Opportunities Engagement
investment
competency
We can interpret relevant response to Demand
as known roles coordinating to take
immediately appropriate actions that
specify options, support opportunities,
or position engagement (scopes), for
impacts at the right levels (scales).
Management of key inputs
(strategy, investment, and competencies)
should prepare the availability of the roles
for interaction, within and across levels.
The stakeholder of Demand relies on effective contributions to the Response.
SCOPES
SCALES
©2020 Malcolm Ryder / Archestra Research

12. Develop Provide Implement
Conceive Produce Deliver
Define Align Target
Market View
Business View
Organiz’n View
SERVICE-ORIENTED AGILITY ENABLES ON-DEMAND FIT-TO-PURPOSE
SCOPES
SCALES
strategy
Options Opportunities Engagement
investment
PREPARE(inputs)
competency
Specify Support Position
HOW (to affect)
WHO
WHAT (to contribute)
Roles are called on to
contribute as needed for
a coordinated response
SCOPES
SCALES
Each role knows what it
does, who for, and why
– and can name it.
The labelling of the
responsibilities aims
to “normalize” them.
A complex response
may feature varying
combinations applied
and altered over time.
©2020MalcolmRyder/ArchestraResearch

13. Develop Provide Implement
Conceive Produce Deliver
Create Align Target
Market View
Business View
Organiz’n View
strategy
Options Opportunities Engagement
investment
competency
For an effective real-time response, what contributions are
needed, at what scale and at what scope?
For the roles related to those contributions, how are they
maximally available to each other?
To support effective on-demand interaction, what is
instituted for capability maturity and cross-functional
communication?
Contributions to the response depend on a culture of enablement.
SCOPES
SCALES
©2020 Malcolm Ryder / Archestra Research

14. Archestra notebooks compile and organize decades of in-the-field and ongoing empirical findings.
All presented findings are derived exclusively from original research.
Archestra notebooks carry no prescriptive warranty.
As ongoing research, all notebooks are subject to change at any time.
©2020 Malcolm Ryder / Archestra Research
www.archestra.com
mryder@archestra.com
Archestra research is done from the perspective of strategy and architecture.
With all subject matter and topics, the purpose of the notes is analytic, primarily to:
* explore, expose and model why things are
included, excluded, or can happen
in given ways and/or to certain effects.
* comment on, and navigate between,
motives and potentials that predetermine
decisions about, and shapings of, the observed activity.