The Concept of Elevation within Deep Tech

While many organisations are now actively seeking exponential growth, they are not yet managing to understand and embrace complexity theory. This means that while exponential growth is perfectly reasonable in many contexts such as in education, health and climate change, there is still a need for caution when chasing exponential results due to the law of unintended consequences.

When we practice systems thinking, we do not just collect and measure indicators, we also take the time to stay the behavioural patterns of a system. It is ironic that many leaders’ concepts of exponential growth remains linear in a certain way, not contemplating their enterprises within any wider contextual systems. For this reason it is important not only to understand the quantitative dimensions of exponential growth, but its qualitative dimensions as well. This is the reason I like the concept of amplification — we can amplify across multiple directions and multiple dimensions at the same time.

Within our concept of Deep Tech there are three dimensions of qualitative growth — elevation, scaling and amplification. These forms of expansion are referred to as the three movements of deep tech, and they are applied in different stages of the development of an organisation’s strategy, design and operational initiatives.

We started to conceive of these movements having had the chance to observe first hand a number of SAFe (Scaled Agile for Enterprise) events and realise that the majority of developers taking part were not actively participating in the overall corporate strategy. In lacking this strategic awareness, we saw that there was an inability to link the design and development workstreams to the strategy in any meaningful way.

We realised that for agility to work at an organisational-wide scale, it had to be able to elevate the organisation to a higher level of actuation, leading to the term ‘augmented agility’. From this point came the conception of the three movements and how to define them within our new conception of deep tech:

• elevation — higher ground
• scaling —informed by universal human values
• amplification — the growth that comes from positive impact

The formation of an amplified organisation starts with the process of elevating its core value proposition. This is a process we describe in our book Deep Tech and the Amplified Organisation. It is only after everyone in an organisation is aligned around the elevated value proposition, understanding the very core of the organisation’s strategy, that it then makes sense to shift into the design stage of deep tech innovation.

Value proposition elevation is not a simple process, in so far that it is not simply a case of following a set methodology. While of course there is a structure to the process of elevation, there is also a set of foundations that need to be in place, starting with universal human values. A value proposition can only be elevated to the extent to which the soul of the organisation is elevated, and for this reason leaders need to develop mastery in order to develop collective competency in this fundamental ability.

About

Simon Robinson is the CEO (worldwide) of Holonomics and the coauthor of Deep Tech and the Amplified Organisation (2021), Customer Experiences with Soul (2017) and Holonomics: Business Where People and Planet Matter (2014)