There is a great idea. Everyone in the organisation who heard the pitch is excited, wants to learn more, swears they are open to help. The founder of the start-up is ready to go all in, investing his time and money. **But who is actually responsible?** Every week a change hypothesis lives without a landing point depreciates it. The idea survived the initial [[Four Conditions and an Agent|check]], but it needs to find a place in the system to become a project and start growing. It won't survive long as the personal initiative of an initiator. Conditions change, and what was a great idea a month ago may not survive the same check. New ideas can arise from anywhere. But to progress they need to connect to the organisation, to realise synergies and use its resources. They need to find **a landing point.** And this implies the standard agent to project to process progression. ![[who owns change.png]] Initially the organisation doesn't own the change. It's produced by an employee or by an external party, and until there is a project, there is no ownership. Stage 1 is a real landing point, but a temporary one: it holds the opportunity on the agent's own motivation, so there are no commitments and no real costs to the organisation. But without stage 1 there is no stage 2. | | Agent | Project | Process | | -------------------------------- | -------------------------------------- | ------------------------ | ---------------------------------- | | Opportunity depreciation horizon | The agent losing interest, or leaving | The project timeline | The product or process lifecycle | | Resources accumulation | Personal capability and open resources | Sponsored to the project | Annual budget | | Organisational ownership | Nearly none | Project scope | Full, depending on final structure | Yes, it is possible to object that if an employee worked on this idea in work hours on a work PC, it belongs to the organisation. But legally that binds only if artefacts were created, and at this stage those artefacts don't cost much. There may also be an objection that an organisation can go straight to stage 3, initiating a new product without ideation or testing anything. That's right, but it has little to do with [[Absorption|absorption]], as absorption implies engaging something outside the organisation's boundary. Going straight to 3 is possible only for the current Run business, internal optimisation and planned growth. The exception is an organisation digitalised enough that testing costs nothing it has to request. However, the implementation phase will still imply some control verification, resembling a project. ### Role of an agent The agent is the source of the change. By definition his creation of a change opportunity doesn't belong to the organisation in the beginning. The agent may be bound by formal KPIs to generate ideas, but until they are handed to the organisation, ownership is very vague. And there are significantly more agents without these "idea initiation" KPIs. Depending on many factors, including entrepreneurship, leadership and personal interest, **the agent may decide to own the initiative or not.** If he drops it before the project stage, there is a high risk the opportunity disappears without a landing point. There may also be more than one agent working on the idea initially. One agent may activate colleagues or partners, who become interested in the opportunity's progression too. The initial agent may quit, passing the work on. At the project and process stages the agent's role remains valuable, as passing an opportunity on is hard to do well. Initial work and lessons should pass to the project and then become part of the process, but they rarely do. A very capable agent can accumulate large resources and proceed with an initiative for a long time without organisational ownership. This is a **source of value dilution for the organisation**, as at this stage ownership is hard to establish. After progressing far, the agent can exit to his own start-up, or to a competitor who offers him better terms than the ownership he holds inside. Managing this is a challenge. ### The limit: high digital representation Everything above assumes an organisation where testing costs resources, and resources have to be requested. That assumption has a limit. The agent will still be human. A non-human agent can be a source of change, but not a driving force, as driving would require a digital representation of the management decision making layer. If all data and the required connectors are available on self-service, a hypothesis may be tested without requesting additional resources, or the mandate that goes with them. Another thing is that an automated environment is more controlled. Committing results to the organisation, the agent formally transfers ownership at the same moment. So [[Four Conditions and an Agent|return]], the fourth condition, comes under question. There is not much room left to negotiate. How to save return in such a system is an open question. In a fully digitalised workflow with evolution built in, there is no absorption at all. The entire workflow already belongs to the organisation, and its evolution phases are a designed adaptation process, running on new experience and changes in the environment. [[Absorption]] requires solving a conflict to find a new optimum.