Sense and Respond: How Successful Organizations Listen to Customers and Create New Products Continuously

by Jeff Gothelf

The alternative to the industrial model is to create small, self-sufficient sense and respond teams. These teams are given autonomy to operate independently in pursuit of an assigned mission—to seek out and create value. An autonomous team has a full set of sense and respond capabilities and can create and participate in two-way conversations with the market. Teams that are able to sense are allowed to interact with the market—to interact with and observe customers, to monitor how they’re using the product, and to create probes, provocations, and tests in order to sense market needs with greater clarity. Teams that are able to respond are able to understand and interpret the sensing data, make decisions based on this data, and then produce a response. So these are the capabilities of a sense and respond team: monitoring and observing customers, creating experiments, understanding and interpreting data, deciding how to respond, and producing a response. These capabilities are not new, but the way we arrange them inside an organization is new. In industrial organizations, these capabilities are typically working in isolation and in sequence. In a sense and respond organization, there is no time for this work flow—and there is a distinct disadvantage created by the isolation this style of information flow creates.