Enterprise Design is the practice of designing enterprises through a coherent Identity, Experience and Architecture, to realise an underlying purpose. This model, grown out of the Enterprise Design Framework first described in the book Intersection, is the basis for such a practice. It integrates the key perspectives for making enterprise change happen, to address a high risk of failure if treated in isolation and lacking coherence. Think of each colour depicted in the Facet model as a lens to be used when looking at the enterprise, and when capturing, describing or reshaping the way its elements form a whole.
Facets provide useful lenses to understand why an enterprise exists, what it is supposed to deliver to whom, and how all of this is supposed to work. Each Facet represents a fundamental big picture question behind an enterprise as your ambitious entrepreneurial project:
In the past, these questions have been treated separately by specialist functions and disciplines, leading to incoherent, siloed, underperforming enterprises. Elements like a sound strategy, a well performing operating model, or a winning product design are simply impossible to get right if there is no shared understanding of the whole enterprise and no coherence between the concepts of today's siloed disciplines.
These universal facets of Identity, Experience and Architecture apply to all enterprises: large companies, startups, public institutions, or NGOs.
Intersections are the overlap between the Facets where you will find questions that are "on the edge" of particular viewpoints and corresponding disciplines present in the enterprise. The intersections (organisation, product, brand) allow us to build integrated perspectives for better conversations, models and joint decision making, they are the connectors between the concepts of today's isolated disciplines.
Enterprise Design entails mapping and describing enterprises and their (potential) evolution, in a quest of revealing insight and co-creating a meaningful future. Using the Facets and their Intersections as a navigation aid, we chart the elements that make the enterprise. The following conceptual model allows us to describe them and generate models and maps to depict and trace their interplay, and express a desired future Enterprise Design.
Finally, the white area in the middle of the model describes the intersection of all three Facets, and represents the unfiltered view on the enterprise itself and its manifestation in daily business, as people exchanging information and working toward a common purpose.
