Prototyping a company

It's like a mirror org

A lot of transformation work is a slide deck pretending to be a change programme.

You know the shape of it: an AI strategy document, a capability map, a roadmap with quarters and workstreams and little persona icons, a governance framework, a centre of excellence. Six months in, the document is slightly more mature and nothing about the actual business has changed.

This isn’t the fault of the people writing the decks. They’re responding to the brief they’ve been given. The brief is the problem. It asks for a plan when the business needs evidence.

So we’ve been using a different shape with clients, borrowed straight from product thinking. We call it a prototype org.

Don’t plan what your org would look like AI-native. Build one.

Product teams figured this out decades ago. If you want to know whether a product will work, you don’t write a strategy document about it. You build a prototype, hand it to real users, and watch what happens. The prototype isn’t the final product and isn’t meant to be. It exists to answer questions a document can’t.

Now apply that to your organisation.

What is it?

A prototype org is a working version of a subset of your business, designed as if it had been built AI-native from scratch. Roles, workflows, agents, handoffs, all drawn on a blank sheet and built well enough to run real work.

You pick a subset narrow enough to actually build (one service line, one functional spine, one principal’s expertise) and wide enough to be interesting. You design it without reference to the incumbent structure. You run it in a sandbox alongside the existing business. You benchmark it against the current team doing the same work.

Then you learn what you could only have learnt by building.

Go read more at : https://www.radicalintelligence.ai/perspectives/the-prototype-org

Dave.