Retail furniture. Commercial insurance policies. They might seem like they don’t have anything in common at all. But my experience this October leads me to a different conclusion.
You see, between spending time at both ITC (InsureTech Connect) and Majesco Frontier exploring the future of insurance, and the High Point Furniture Market exploring how to better enable customer experiences in retail, strangely enough, I kept hearing the same kinds of issues. Not the same words. But the same pattern.
A pattern that circles around creating better outcomes in increasingly complex ecosystems.
I’ve spent a decent amount of my time attempting to DRAW the SPLICE Partner Ecosystem in a way that people can easily understand. And honestly, I haven’t figured it out yet. And maybe, the way we draw our ecosystems is partially to blame.
Shall we explore?
The Ecosystem Diagram We All Learned
How do you typically draw an ecosystem?
With your company in the middle?
Employees are probably somewhere inside.
Technology sits in there somewhere too.
And then what about customers? And partners? Are they also inside? Connected via lines? Dotted lines? Within boxes of colored lines? What does it all mean?
Yeah, that’s where I usually get to with my drawings 🤣
And when I start talking to the people, it almost immediately breaks down.
After all, a customer doesn't wake up thinking, “let me follow this dotted line to my account rep”. An employee isn’t thinking, “when did that solid line become a dotted one?” when they’re trying to reach the partner contact who’s moved on to another organization.
Nobody is thinking about the diagram.
They're thinking about the outcome they need to achieve.
ACROSS ecosystems.
Because the customer in YOUR ecosystem is an employee in somebody else's. Your employee is a customer somewhere else. Your partner is also a vendor. Your vendor is somebody's client. And every one of those people is carrying expectations, experiences, frustrations, and preferences from one ecosystem into the next.
The lines on our diagrams don't stop them.
If anything, they ignore them completely.
Which is probably why ecosystems feel so much messier in real life than they do in PowerPoint.
Because the diagram doesn’t show the living outcomes.
So, what if we mapped outcomes instead?
And what if you had to be able to clearly state how your piece of the puzzle enables the outcome in order to get on the map?
When you look at it that way, the ecosystem starts feeling less like a collection of organizations and more like a community working toward a shared purpose. Or maybe, more like a constellation.
Ecosystems as Constellations
Think about actual constellations.
Nobody drew Orion and then said, “let’s put stars here, here and here”.
Humans looked at a collection of stars and recognized a pattern.
The stars existed first.
The picture emerged later.
What if ecosystems work the same way?
You have customers, employees, partners, technologies, advisors, communities, and data sources. Each contributes something unique. And the "lines" become visible when they collectively create an outcome.
But this creates an interesting design question...
If no individual person draws the lines (the collaborative outcome does), how do we design ecosystems? Because inherently there’s a person designing it.
And I think that all has to do with aligning on something different than we’re aligning on right now.
Aligning on Desired Outcomes
Most ecosystem conversations start with participants.
Who are my customers?
What other companies target/serve those customers (partners)?
Who owns the sales process?
Which technology is involved?
Those are all reasonable questions. But they're also questions about structure. And we’re trying to lead from outcomes instead. Oh, and not just organizational outcomes. Human outcomes.
So, instead of asking:
"How do we connect all these dots?"
Maybe the first question is:
"What outcome are we collectively trying to create that none of us could create alone?"
That's a very different conversation.
And when people answer THAT question, they stop describing themselves and start describing their contribution. The focus shifts from ownership to enablement. From hierarchy to collaboration. From individual success to shared success.
And all of a sudden? Orion.
Drawing the Constellation
Imagine putting the outcome in the middle of the page.
Then ask each participant a simple question:
What unique thing do you contribute that helps make this outcome possible?
Now you've got your stars.
The customer brings context.
The employees bring expertise.
The partners bring capability.
The technology brings scale.
The community brings insight.
The data provides direction.
The lines emerge when we understand how those contributions depend on one another. And unlike the diagrams we've all been drawing for years, those lines aren't permanent.
They're living.
They change as the outcome changes.
They strengthen through trust.
They weaken through neglect.
They disappear when they're no longer needed.
And new ones appear all the time.
The Infrastructure Between = Communication
What really fascinates me about all of this is how much happens in SPACE.
The conversations. The introductions. The referrals. The knowledge sharing. The trust.
That's the infrastructure. And it all happens through...you guessed it, communication.
Without communication, the stars are still there.
But they remain isolated points.
Communication is what turns individual contributors into a connected system capable of creating outcomes together.
So maybe we don’t need to draw the system at all.
Maybe we just need to identify how the communication schedule enables the accomplishment of the desired outcome. And measure how strong the connections become because of that investment.
I wonder what THAT could enable? 😉
