Companies need to ensure reliable processes, but also the disruption of existing structures. A contradiction, but organizational ambidexterity helps managers to manage it.
Organizational ambidexterity can be used to moderate the supposed contradiction between maintaining and optimizing tried and tested things on the one hand and exploring new paths - i.e. innovation - on the other.
The IT industry is under constant fire: it is affected more than almost any other discipline by the need to adapt, innovate and find answers to unprecedented questions. One of the fields of action that is emerging is the acid test of simultaneously meeting contradictory requirements.
On the one hand, there is the pursuit of efficiency, stability, quality, compliance with service level agreements, the management of existing or legacy systems and the safeguarding of established, standardized processes that must meet clear requirements. On the other hand, we are confronted with advancing digitalization, which is increasingly influencing our economic activity. This is accompanied by a growing desire for innovation, an agile approach and ever shorter development cycles (time 2 market), in which an IT service must appear on the market and prove itself.
Control and/or self-organization?
In addition to these requirements, new ways of working have also become established in the IT departments. The traditional paradigm of control/management based on central KPIs is proving to be contradictory to independent work, distributed management and the consideration of individual people and their development goals. Gaining structure, sorting, orientation and thus the ability to act in this mixed situation is increasingly becoming the new field of work for IT managers.
The best way to manage this contradiction is through organizational ambidexterity. Ambidexterity explicitly refers to the contradiction between maintaining and optimizing tried and tested things on the one hand and exploring new paths - i.e. innovation - on the other. Although both goals are important and relevant for companies, their consequences, basic assumptions and tools remain contradictory.
Ambidexterity literally means "ambidexterity" and actually refers to people who can write almost equally well with both hands. Applied to organizations, this means that companies must be committed to stable, reliable processes and at the same time to the dissolution and disruption of existing structures. It's obvious that you can't just do both; the contradiction must be resolved. But how?
Tackling with the right hand
As with writing, right-handed people can copy a longer piece of text with their left hand. However, there are various problems with this: The writing looks crooked and blurred (quality problem), it takes decidedly longer (quantity problem) and, in addition, the hand cramps up when writing, you tire more easily and are ultimately dissatisfied with the relationship between high effort and poor result. The solution must therefore be to tackle the relevant work, projects and tasks consciously and transparently with the "right hand".
Ambidexterity can be visualized with the principle of bimodal IT, which has been trying to resolve precisely this contradiction for some time: Here, too, the large playing field of IT is divided into those areas where stable and standards-oriented processes ensure reliability. Such projects often have a longer planning horizon and the results should provide a stable basis in the longer term. On the other hand, there are those areas in which development takes place spontaneously, at short notice and usually through trials with prototypes.
Harmonize Explore and Exploit
The two playing fields differ in that in the first the problem is often clear, the tools are available or at least known and the goal is usually easy to describe. The aim here is to optimize.
The supporters of ambidexterity speak of "exploit". In the second case, it is often only clear that there is a problem. The goal is only partially known or only known with a few characteristics, the path to it can be different and the tools are not available or even have to be created first.
This area is described by the term "Explore".
A trench war has opened up between the two approaches, not least on the basis of the debate about agility, which gives the impression that only one of the two approaches is correct. Ambidexterity takes a clear position on this and describes how important both principles are for successful work. It is not a question of choosing one of the two, but of using and managing both as required. As is so often the case, managers play a key role in the whole process. They are the ones who have an overview of tasks, objectives and targets to be met when necessary. On this basis, they can manage resources in a targeted manner.
Information in this article was originally posted by: CIO