There’s a comfortable illusion in many boardrooms: the belief that talking about the future exempts you from delivering in the present \u2014 that whoever thinks in ten-year terms can afford to fall short in ninety days.<\/p>\n
But it’s exactly the opposite. In a real organization, exploring the future isn’t funded by vision or enthusiasm: it’s funded by the margin, time, and credibility generated by meeting today’s goals.<\/p>\n
Most companies don’t have a clear idea of architecture. At best, they have an innovation committee isolated from the real business, or a continuous improvement department refining processes that no one will need five years from now. Neither of these is Organizational Ambidexterity. It’s the illusion of having it \u2014 and in management, illusions, though paid for late, tend to be expensive.<\/p>\n
Ambidexterity \u2014 the ability to excel at exploiting today’s business while, with the same discipline, exploring what’s to come \u2014 is not an academic office concept. As James March proposed, and later Charles O’Reilly and Michael Tushman, it is a design paradox. It isn’t solved with an innovation speech at the company’s annual convention. It is resolved, or not resolved, within the management architecture that a leader has the courage to build.<\/p>\n
Ambidexterity cannot be improvised \u2014 it must be designed. And designing it is an act of leadership, not a consulting project.<\/p>\n
It’s worth pausing here, because the term is used with a lightness that has already emptied it of content. James March formulated it in 1991 with a clarity that still unsettles: every organization lives in tension between exploiting \u2014 refining, standardizing, making more efficient what it already knows how to do \u2014 and exploring \u2014 searching, varying, experimenting, discovering what it does not yet know.<\/p>\n
These are not two complementary activities coexisting in peace. They are two logics competing for the same scarce resources: capital, top talent, and, above all, the attention of decision-makers.<\/p>\n
March also described the two traps: an organization that only exploits becomes extraordinarily competent at something the market will stop rewarding \u2014 the trap of success, which kills profitable companies, not companies in crisis; one that only explores accumulates options, pilots, and enthusiasm without converting any of it into results \u2014 the trap of failure, noisier, but equally lethal.<\/p>\n
Ambidexterity is not the midpoint between the two. It is the capacity to sustain both logics at once, without one devouring the other.<\/p>\n
Charles O’Reilly and Michael Tushman took the next step: they described how this is built in practice. Structural ambidexterity separates the units \u2014 one team explores, another exploits \u2014 and integration happens at the top, in a senior leadership that shares resources, judgment, and vision; if that integration doesn’t exist, there is no ambidexterity \u2014 there are simply two companies coexisting in the same building.<\/p>\n
Contextual ambidexterity doesn’t separate anything; it asks each person to decide, in their day-to-day work, how much time to devote to improving what already exists and how much to questioning it \u2014 which requires culture, judgment, and leadership that explicitly authorizes that decision. And sequential ambidexterity alternates over time, with cycles of exploration followed by cycles of consolidation \u2014 useful in small organizations or in industries that change in leaps rather than by drift.<\/p>\n
And this tension isn’t an academic laboratory finding. Xavier Marcet, who has spent years observing companies from the inside, arrives at exactly the same place by another path. In Management del sentido com\u00fan, he names it as the second great tension of management, the one played out between the present and the future. His diagnosis is uncomfortable and precise \u2014 day-to-day operations tend to consume everything, and the organization that fails to put the future on the present’s agenda ends up consumed by what he calls, without euphemisms, “the cancer of short-termism.”<\/p>\n
Quoting from the book…<\/p>\n
“Second tension: between the present and the future. Once we create value, the point is for it not to be fleeting. Companies seek for this value creation to have long-lasting reach. Businesses, meanwhile, move from operation to operation. Our companies live in a present full of urgencies and problems, and day-to-day work tends to occupy all of our time, but if we are not capable of putting the future on the present’s agenda and innovating, companies will perish from the cancer of short-termism.” (Pages 66 and 67)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
March formulated it from theory. Marcet names it from observation. And you live it every Monday, when you decide what does and doesn’t make it onto the committee’s agenda. All three are talking about the same thing: the future does not defend itself \u2014 someone has to put it on the agenda.<\/p>\n
None of the three approaches is inherently superior. What determines success is not which one you choose, but whether there is a management layer capable of sustaining it when quarterly pressure tightens \u2014 because it always does.<\/p>\n
And here lies the blind spot in almost all the literature on ambidexterity: it talks about structure, it talks about culture, it talks about leadership, but it almost never talks about the operational layer that converts structure and culture into something more than good intentions. That layer has a name and a method: it’s called process management.<\/p>\n
The Mistake Almost Every Senior Leadership Team Makes<\/strong><\/h2>\n
The most common \u2014 and most costly \u2014 mistake is treating exploration and exploitation as enemy camps, as if they were the responsibility of areas that don’t need to talk to each other. The human body doesn’t work that way: it maintains stability and adaptive capacity at the same time, without one system canceling out the other. An organization that doesn’t learn to do the same isn’t managing \u2014 it’s just waiting its turn to become irrelevant.<\/p>\n
And this is where almost every leader errs twice. First, they believe BPM (process management) is the natural enemy of innovation, because it standardizes, controls, and reduces variability. Second, they believe innovation is a spontaneous creative event that occurs outside the management system, not within it. Both beliefs are costly, and both are false.<\/p>\n
A well-governed process is not a straitjacket \u2014 it’s future infrastructure. If your daily operation requires you to put out fires every single day, you don’t have an innovation problem, you have a process problem. And that problem is stealing the oxygen from any serious attempt at building the future.<\/p>\n
But saying this in general terms won’t convince anyone who has to defend a budget. That’s why it’s better to get specific.<\/p>\n
What BPM Brings to Ambidexterity: Three Concrete Contributions<\/strong><\/h2>\n
First, it frees up the scarcest resource of all: leadership’s attention. A standardized, measured, and governed process reduces the real cost of running today’s business \u2014 less rework, fewer errors, shorter cycle times, fewer people manually resolving what the system should handle on its own.<\/p>\n
This savings is not the end goal, but rather the budget for exploration. When a process’s execution time drops from 7 days to 1.91, what is gained is not just efficiency \u2014 space is gained on the agenda and in the minds of the people who should be thinking about the business that lies ahead.<\/p>\n
No organization explores well while its steering committee spends 80% of its time putting out operational fires. Exploration is not funded by enthusiasm \u2014 it is funded by freed-up capacity.<\/p>\n
Second, it delivers the map and the common language without which exploring is simply gambling. BPM forces organizations to answer, in writing, questions that most have never answered \u2014 such as what exactly we do, who is responsible for each thing, where it breaks down, how much it costs, and which indicator measures it.<\/p>\n
This map is the precondition for intelligent exploration, and without it, innovation doesn’t know what it’s discussing or what it’s putting at risk \u2014 and discovers the damage only once it’s already expensive. When 275 indicators connect daily operations with strategy, the nature of the committee’s conversation changes: opinions are no longer debated, and decisions are made based on evidence instead. And process governance brings something no innovation structure delivers on its own: clear rules about who can change what, under which criteria, and with what traceability.<\/p>\n
The third contribution is the one almost no one names: it industrializes what exploration discovers. An innovation that isn’t turned into a process is just a conference anecdote. The ambidexterity cycle doesn’t close when the pilot works, but when what was learned returns to operations and becomes repeatable, scalable, and measurable for everyone \u2014 not just for the team that invented it.<\/p>\n
That return path is BPM’s territory: modeling the new process, assigning owners, instrumenting indicators, governing its evolution. Without this layer, the organization innovates and forgets, accumulating successful pilots that never scaled and lessons that left along with the person who learned them. BPM is not exploration’s brake \u2014 it is the mechanism that turns it into installed capacity, and installed capacity is the one thing a competitor can’t copy with a PowerPoint.<\/p>\n
The Architecture That Actually Works: 3P’s<\/strong><\/h2>\n
For more than 20 years, I’ve followed transformation processes in organizations across the region, and I’ve seen the same scene repeat itself with a regularity that no longer surprises me: strategic planning, the project management office, and process management living on different floors of the same building, not sharing a single indicator, and speaking to one another only once a year, in a budget meeting.<\/p>\n
That’s where the 3P’s Methodology<\/a> (Planning, Projects, and Processes) was born: a systematic, tested attempt to stop treating as three separate departments what is, in reality, a single living organism.<\/p>\n
Thinking the way Peter Senge would put it \u2014 “reality is made up of circles, but we see straight lines; that is our first limitation in thinking systemically” \u2014 the organization breathes through three organs:<\/p>\n
\n
- Planning (the brain)
\nDefines purpose, direction, and priority. It is the layer that consciously decides \u2014 rather than defaulting into \u2014 how much to exploit and how much to explore. If your planning isn’t making that decision with full intention, someone else is making it for you \u2014 usually whichever area shouts loudest, or the inertia of last year’s budget.<\/li>\n- Projects (the nervous and muscular system)
\nTranslate intention into real movement. Without projects with an owner, a deadline, and focus, planning is a beautiful document that no one executes and everyone applauds.<\/li>\n- Processes (the circulatory system)
\nSustain the organization’s daily life: efficiency, quality, continuity. Without this layer functioning, neither of the other two has anything to fund it.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\nPlanning is created and defined top-down \u2014 it’s about strategy. But it is executed and sustained bottom-up, through Processes. BPM should be the engine that makes it possible to reach the strategy \u2014 not the department that watches over it from the outside, nor the bureaucracy that slows it down.<\/p>\n
None of the three generates value on its own. And when they are finally managed as a single system \u2014 with a common language, shared indicators, and explicit governance \u2014 something happens that every steering committee should feel in its bones: innovation stops being chaotic and becomes strategic; efficiency stops being rigid and becomes adaptable; operations stop holding back change and start sustaining it.<\/p>\n
The Short Term Isn’t the Enemy of the Future \u2014 It’s the One Who Pays for It<\/strong><\/h2>\n
Think of it in terms of cash. Every point of efficiency a process frees up \u2014 a cycle that drops from seven days to under two, rework that stops happening, an error that no longer has to be fixed three times over \u2014 is money and attention that become available. That surplus is the only genuine budget exploration has. Organizations that don’t generate it don’t explore less because they lack creativity \u2014 they explore less because they have nothing left over.<\/p>\n
And there’s something even harder to recover than money: the right to be heard. A director who doesn’t deliver results this quarter loses the authority to ask for patience on what they promise for the next five years. Strategic ambition is built on a reputation for follow-through, not on a good presentation. Delivering today is what buys you the permission to bet tomorrow.<\/p>\n
None of this is a defense of short-termism \u2014 the two are distinct things, and it’s worth not confusing them. The short term is rhythm, demanding goals, fast feedback, constant contact with the reality of the business. Short-termism is something else: it’s when the quarter stops being a rhythm and becomes the only horizon \u2014 and then the first thing to get cut is always whatever isn’t paying off yet… in other words, the future.<\/p>\n
Organizational Ambidexterity lives exactly in that tension, and the leader who sustains it isn’t the one who picks a side. It’s the one who delivers the quarter with process discipline and, with what that discipline frees up, funds the exploration that no quarter will ever ask for. Exploiting the present well isn’t the opposite of exploring the future \u2014 it’s the condition that makes it possible.<\/p>\n
Moonshot Thinking: Exploration Needs Ambition, Not Just Space<\/strong><\/h2>\n
Here’s something almost no one dares to say out loud: dedicating time and budget to exploration is absolutely worthless if it keeps thinking small. Many organizations “innovate” by improving something that already exists by 10%. That’s not exploration \u2014 it’s exploitation disguised as innovation, and disguising it doesn’t make it any less dangerous.<\/p>\n
Moonshot thinking is the logic behind disruptive innovation labs like Google X, and it’s what I work on with my graduate students in digital transformation \u2014 it exists precisely to shake organizations out of this comfortable deception.<\/p>\n
It’s not a free-form creativity exercise, but a protocol of uncomfortable questions every leadership team should ask itself, behind closed doors and without a PowerPoint, before approving the next strategic plan:<\/p>\n
\n
- What are, with complete honesty, the limits to value creation in our current business model? Not the market’s limits \u2014 the ones we ourselves built, and that no one wants to talk about in the boardroom.<\/li>\n
- What ideas, enabled by today’s technology and the ambition of our organization’s next generation of leaders, have real potential to generate disruptive \u2014 not just incremental \u2014 value?<\/li>\n
- If our organization carried none of the past’s limitations, what would be the best way to fulfill its mission over the next five to ten years?<\/li>\n
- With key stakeholders at the table, can we name a goal ambitious enough that, if achieved, would permanently change our position in the market?<\/li>\n
- Does that goal generate enough value to justify the change it demands? If the answer is lukewarm, you don’t have a Moonshot \u2014 you have a budget target disguised with a fancy name.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n
This is exactly the role the Planning layer of the 3P’s must play within ambidexterity: not managing the status quo with more ambitious metrics, but questioning it with enough courage that exploration stops being cosmetic and starts to sting a little. If it doesn’t unsettle anyone in the room, it’s not a Moonshot.<\/p>\n
The Human Side of Ambidexterity: Without Committed People, No Architecture Survives<\/strong><\/h2>\n
All of this can sound like pure organizational design \u2014 structures, governance, indicators \u2014 and that’s exactly the risk: reducing Ambidexterity to an engineering problem and forgetting that it’s carried out by flesh-and-blood people, afraid of change, often working under incentives that reward the exact opposite of what’s being asked of them.<\/p>\n
Every transformation project rests on three pillars: process, technology, and people. When technology moves faster than the people and structures meant to absorb it, the result isn’t innovation \u2014 it’s automated chaos.<\/p>\n
When process moves ahead without people, the result is pure frustration. The point where value is actually generated only exists when all three dimensions move forward together \u2014 and the one that’s almost always sacrificed first, the one nobody defends in the budget meeting, is people.<\/p>\n
Processes either protect or punish people, depending on their level of adoption maturity. A mature process frees up time, reduces human error, and provides predictability. An immature or poorly governed one turns every employee into the silent shock absorber for everything the organization failed to resolve in time. This isn’t a technical detail \u2014 it’s an ethical decision your organization makes every day, without naming it as such.<\/p>\n
Resistance to change isn’t solved with a memo or a one-hour motivational talk. It’s solved by recognizing that every person in the organization is being pushed, daily, toward today’s efficiency and tomorrow’s uncertainty \u2014 the same tension March described at the organizational level is experienced first, and more painfully, at the individual level, by every person deciding how much time to devote to the urgent and how much to the important.<\/p>\n
Ambidexterity isn’t designed by a consultant or decreed by a committee. It is sustained by people who have been trained, led, and supported to live that tension with dignity. Without them, everything said before is empty architecture.<\/p>\n
The Numbers Prove It: The Atuntaqui Case<\/strong><\/h2>\n