Evolution

Use experience from change to adapt, renew, and strengthen the capability through which future change is undertaken.

What it is

Evolution uses what a change taught the organization to strengthen how it undertakes the next one. It is the only function that acts beyond the current change.

In the loop

Every other function works on the change in front of it. Evolution works on the organization's capacity to change at all, which the framework calls change capability. It sits at the end of the loop, and what it produces is not part of this change's outcomes.

The learning worth carrying forward is broader than a lessons-learned list. It can concern the organization itself, and what the change revealed about how it actually works. It can concern the assumptions and criteria used to reason, and which of them turned out to be unreliable. It can concern the practices and governance through which the change was run. It can concern the knowledge built during the work, or the documentation needed to keep an accurate picture of the organizational state.

The test is whether something persists. Learning that stays inside the initiative and changes nothing available to future work has not evolved anything. A retrospective that produced a document nobody consults is not capability evolution. Improved decision practice, updated knowledge of how the organization is actually arranged, stronger governance, better methods, better prepared people: those persist and count.

Because it acts on capability rather than on the change, its effect appears in changes that have not started yet. That makes it the easiest function to defer indefinitely without any visible consequence.

Vulnerability

Capability stagnation or erosion. Change capability is not stable. People leave and take knowledge with them. Skills fade. Information about how the organization works goes out of date. Practices lose relevance, systems and governance shift, new constraints appear.

Capability therefore declines without active renewal, even where it was strong. Doing nothing is not neutral.

Capability evolution is the practice that addresses it.

Capability stagnation or erosion. Capability evolution is the practice that addresses it.

Guiding question

How should the way we undertake future change evolve based on what this change has taught us?

Related

• Evolution is one of the five functions of The Intent Loop. It has no corresponding fundamental element of change.
• It follows the Validation function, and acts on change capability rather than returning to an earlier function of the current change.
• Capability evolution is the practice for this function.