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#3 Coalition Building

Today's Enterprise Design pattern is about how to deal with conflicting interests in an enterprise. Be aware that personal interests and corporate politics are important constraints on your design challenge of co-creating better enterprises!

Enjoy! Wolfgang


“You win by working hard, making tough decisions and building coalitions.” - John Engler

You need to stimulate the collaboration between many people in the enterprise.

IN THIS CONTEXT

The many people working on the design of the enterprise in parallel are often working in silos and have their own concerns. Your new job intersects with theirs, often leading to conflicts and obstacles. Without active collaboration of these other people, your ability to function as an Enterprise Designer is severely limited.

THEREFORE

Connect with people working in roles with cross-company challenges. Search for experienced people like middle managers, product developers, customer experience designers, process managers, subject matter experts, business analysts, etc. Find out what makes them tick. Co-create ideas for sharing creations and collaboration to achieve your mutual goals: . Share your Enterprise Design intentions and invite people to collaborate, starting with asking them about their views of the enterprise; . Listen to understand their pains and intentions and try to understand how you can help them and how their goals are related to yours; . Present your key learnings from pre-existing wisdom and help them understand your mission and how you can help them with theirs; . Invite them to co-create the Enterprise Design Charter and announce that you are planning to invite them to the safe negotiation space; . Invite them to become ambassadors for your collaborative Enterprise Design work, helping you socialise its mission and bring more supporters into the coalition.

CONSEQUENTLY

You have started to plant the seeds for the collaboration needed to achieve your mission.

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Capturing a wealth of experience from many sources, four world-class enterprise designers and architects present a collection of 35 immediately applicable solutions to successful enterprise design.

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About the author

Milan Guenther

Milan Guenther

President
Intersection Group
Paris, France

Milan is president of Intersection Group, and a co-founder of the consultancy Enterprise Design Associates and Teamenu, a digital workplace SAAS business. 12 years back, Milan launched a social software startup and designed a patented innovation for commercial flight decks. Today he works with enterprises of all shapes and sizes, to make them deliver, and useful to people. He's been working with enterprises like Google, SAP, Toyota, ThoughtWorks, OECD and the UN. His first book Intersection introduces this Enterprise Design approach, and he is co-organising the Intersection conference series since 2014. He is co-author of the book Enterprise Design Patterns and curator of EDGY, an Open Source tool for co-creating better enterprises, adopted by organisations around the globe.