Building a World Wise & Neighbourhood Smart Organisation

How do you create a team that beats the competition locally and regionally?

TLDR

This article discusses creating a world-wise and Neighbourhood-Smart (WWNS) organisation by balancing global and local capabilities to deliver maximum customer value. It highlights the need for organisations to understand and periodically adjust their "operating state" to align with evolving market, customer, and organisational dynamics. Key considerations include managing organisational maturity, scale, and operating models while fostering open communication, diverse teams, and flexible strategies to ensure sustained effectiveness and efficiency across markets.

Introduction

What opportunity is your organisation failing to seize and why?

In this third article about creating a World Wise & Neighbourhood Smart (WWNS) organisation, we build on identifying the inflexion point where you could be more effective and efficient at value delivery for your customers. We use the insight from understanding the actual similarities and differences. We bring those together to create an organisation that uses its global and local abilities to be the best and fastest at value delivery for its customers. If you have arrived here without reading the first and second articles we recommend starting here.

We'll examine the organisational challenges to be aware of and the approaches you can take to create and operate a WWNS organisation. We'll also explore the process to get there and, crucially, the process of reviewing the operating state regularly to respond to changes and plan to take advantage of identified opportunities.

You may have noted the phrase operating state; I want to emphasise to the teams that need to work across the global and local parts of your organisation that while we have a way to operate, that state will evolve because of customer, market or organisational changes. We define an operating state as a way of operating for a period. This operating state gives us space to deliver using straightforward ways of working, knowing that periodically, we'll review and change to keep us in an optimal operating state. In short operating models are choices, operating states are agile ways of working. Let's turn our focus inward to your organisation.

Today's Organisation

We'll start by continuing the theme of the second article and looking at our current situation. However, in this case, it is the state of your organisation that interests us most. In our experience, organisational differences are the strongest drivers of whether an organisation is effective and efficient at value delivery to its customers.

Maturity

Firstly, let's look at the maturity of your business. If you are a new market entrant, you have much to learn; you must choose where to put your effort. Usually, it's the basics of whether I can sell or support my product here, less so on what precise way I should sell or what precise feature I need to succeed.

As the business grows in knowledge, it will understand the local needs. It can focus its efforts on the most valuable areas.

Top Tip: Markets and products mature. Don't keep your WWNS operating model standing still.

Scale

In addition to your maturity, we need to consider scale, not in the market but in your organisation. Organisations with very large and very small local operations are imbalanced, making "scale" the single most challenging factor to manage. One market produces more turnover and, therefore, more net profit. Size gives a market sway over the future direction of the product. This sway, driven by cash flow and shorter-term measures of success, happens despite the company's larger ambitions. At the same time, expansion into a new market can demand new features that are "must-haves" to be successful here, often making forays into new markets much less profitable.

As expansion continues, you get a more natural imbalance, where a bigger market is a more significant net profit contributor to the organisation and can demand more attention, features, and localisation.

Getting the balance right here requires a certain level of maturity for teams to collaborate on the larger goal. If this is to happen, you must look at how the "team" is managed. How can you make people locally able to make a difference but also do that in a way that supports the broader goals of the organisation?

Top Tip: Examine your organisation's incentive structure. Does it promote getting the best results, or does it incentivise one team to work at the expense of others? Changing this takes time, but acknowledging it and ensuring it does not drive the wrong results is a significant first step.

Operating Model

There are many ways to set up your operating model. Are you effectively one company, or are you a brand everywhere but with many separate organisations, each with its P and L? Or are you a mix of different set-ups?

The reality is that changing an operating model is a longer-term activity, so you must live with what you have. Instead of worrying about the operating model, this is a matrix management problem: how to get a group of teams with different goals to work together.

Top Tip: Don't ignore the operating model differences; acknowledge them. Have the leadership communicate the bigger vision and take all the teams on the journey together.

Today's Product Capabilities

Now that we have a view of your organisational drivers, we need to examine the capabilities that your product needs. Various tools help you break this down; you are creating a view of the core capabilities you'll need to succeed. If we consider a digital product, then this might include:

• The core app

• The languages and markets

• App location & use

• Backend location

• Inputs & Outputs

• Data storage location

• Support needed

• Wording & Imagery

• Features

• Interactivity

• Payments

• Sign-in/security

• URL

• Search terms

• App stores

Make a list of your product's core capabilities. Next, examine each one to determine the smartest way to deliver on it.

Bringing it all together

We gather all our information and work as a team to define and build a new operating state.

In the first article, we discussed the measures of value that drive your thinking. In the second one, we examined the critical drivers of similarity and difference, and you will now have a view of each part. In this article, we have looked at your organisation and your product features, giving us this list:

• A measure of value to deliver.

• The similarities, differences, and effects of your operating model, scale, and maturity on your product and how to combine them.

• A list of core product features needed by customers.

It is time to discuss how to operate each product feature, market by market. But before we do so, here are two key points to help the team before they start thinking about how to deliver.

Change

Firstly, be open about how to manage change. Change matters because discussing how you should efficiently operate is all about now. Situations change, so this isn't an operating model; this is an operating state that should change as your market and product state change. This discussion is vital; otherwise, over time, you'll argue over who owns what when the markets move, and your once shiny new operating model has become outdated.

Top Tip: Review every six months. Get soundings from your experts on product drivers like sales, tech, legal, marketing, and support. Where are the new opportunities, and how can you most efficiently meet them?

Alternative Build Models

The second thing to share with the team is the essential build models you can follow. There are a variety of options, all with different pros and cons. A shared terminology will help the team set up that initial operating state.

For example, many organisations provide templated adverts that local teams can customise with their details, prices, etc. You could also deploy a globally developed capability to all users and markets but then enhance it with local imagery. Such approaches lower cost, support consistency and maximise market speed but also let the local team choose where they can be the most successful.

There are three core models to follow:

• Build locally—roll out locally. For example, a local market can create additional value by partnering with another local company to offer extra value to its customers.

• Build globally, roll out locally, e.g., a new feature launched to coincide with Mother's Day.

• Build globally - customise locally, e.g. A new product with initial global imagery that is customised with a local-to-the-market imagery.

The Process

The next stage is a discussion and workshop with trusted representatives from the teams locally and globally to help them derive a better state from maximising value delivery to the customers.

At the end of this process, you should clearly understand why you choose rationally, driven by value, to carry out which functions locally or globally (Remember, this operating state can and must change as the markets change). Above all, this is an exercise in agile change, so the next point is probably the most important: communication.

Communicate

Through all of this, you need to lead and communicate. Tell people where you are trying to go (being better at delivering value) and why you are doing it (to be better than your competition). It would be best to gather people to have honest conversations about the global vs local route.

You will need leadership to own this communication. Your organisational structure model and incentive structures will actively get in the way. Over time, those need to change or flex to help the organisation meet its bigger goal.

Most crucially, people's roles will change when you do this. You may now require a central cloud services team to support more markets. Locally, you might not focus on language but instead on cooperating to manage T & Cs with other countries.

Lastly and most importantly, not all good ideas are yours, but it is also true that sometimes they are. It would be optimal if you found a way to combine the best needs and ideas, deliver them, and share them. Suppose one side feels they monopolise the intelligent way to solve the problem. In that case, there will be issues with openly finding the best way to operate globally and locally. Listening and using data to drive decision-making will take you a long way here. Let's also look at some additional attributes that can make this agile operation sustainable.

Integrate

The last and most crucial part of working globally and locally is to ensure that your teams doing this are diverse. I once went to a local office in Paris of a Global Brand to find signs urging the team to "do more"; in English, it "n’est pas passé inaperçu".

Top Tip: You must build your teams in all locations to reflect the breadth of your customers and users. You'll win with broader perspectives, make better connections between the local and global teams, and beat the competition because you better understand the markets.

Summary

There is a lot of value in efficiently delivering a product across markets, but this value is easy to lose. There is value in doing things locally, but many great ideas never reach others, and repetition can and does result.

The honest answer lies in between driven by higher goals and outcomes (Like those from this HBR report Matrix Management: Not a Structure, a Frame of Mind); you can find the best model for your organisation today.

Practical steps

• Using inputs of value, ability to deliver, key differentiators, and core product functions.

• Work with your wider team to understand where your unmet opportunities lie.

• Acknowledge the challenges your organisation and incentive structure face with this.

• Do this openly

• Explain why, as it involves change.

• Repeat this process regularly.

• Stay ahead with a diverse team that knows and understands the markets and each other, both centrally and locally.

This combined approach will ensure that you, your team and organisation remain positioned to succeed as markets and products evolve.

We hope you found this three-part series informative and would love to get your feedback on these ideas and your experience. What haven’t we considered? How does your organisation manage this? Are you winning regionally and locally or does your organisation make value delivery hard? Jump into the comments, and lastly thank you for reading.