IT Revolution

In today's article, we look at the Outcome Loop and the Outcome Tree from Mik Kersten's upcoming book, Output to Outcome. "Most organizations manage either inputs or outputs. Strategy and budgeting processes define inputs. Agile and DevOps practices manage outputs. What’s missing is the closed loop that connects them—and then connects outputs back to actual outcomes so you can learn whether any of it worked." Read more: itrev.io/3RmHlSu

When competitors are eating your lunch and the board is threatening to split the company, most executives look everywhere for answers—except IT. That's a mistake that costs companies everything. Order The Phoenix Project Volume III today, and complete your collection! itrev.io/4q9TYvF

Most executive AI curricula cover the technology. Few address what actually determines success: whether an organization can evolve around it. Melissa M. Reeve's new book closes that gap—with four decades of organizational research reimagined for the AI era and case studies built for executive discussion. Order Hyperadaptive today: buff.ly/L17nyxk

You can now keep track of Mik Kersten and his upcoming book, Output to Outcome, through his new website and newsletter! He's got some exciting things planned, so stay tuned... Website: itrev.io/4nNKdnE Newsletter: buff.ly/9Ongs0Q

If you work in flow or value stream management, Flowtopia 2026 is kind of the event to have on your radar. Get insights from ITRev authors Matthew Skelton, Steve Pereira, Helen Beal, and other great speakers! buff.ly/2XmKDDc

Why should you read Hyperadaptive? It speaks for itself... "The twentieth-century operating system has been obsolete for years, yet most companies still rely on it. They are about to become fossils. The question isn’t whether you should embrace AI. It’s whether you can rewire your organization before it’s too late." —Melissa M. Reeve in Hyperadaptive: Rewiring the Enterprise to Become AI-Native Order now: buff.ly/L17nyxk

Brendan Hopper, Matt Beane and I have a thesis, one that I've been sharing around lately, and we want CEOs and boards to hear it. Before I get to the thesis, let's revisit Clayton Christensen's Innovator's Dilemma (ID), the theory he developed at HBS to explain why big companies often get eaten by upstarts during technology shifts. In short, the ID says incumbents serve their best customers so well, and tune themselves so ruthlessly for doing exactly what they do today, that they can't chase the disruptor tech coming up from below until it's too late. The classic solution to the Innovator's Dilemma is to create a "bubble" in your company. You carve out an innovation team with a budget and mandate, as unfettered as practical by the parent organization. This is to combat the 2-level trap presented by the dilemma. The economic trap is Christensen's original point: a disruptive technology can't justify itself under your existing P&L, because it serves smaller or weirder customers at margins your real business would never accept. The governance trap is what gets piled on top once you're big: SOC2, FedRAMP, etc. mean every new idea has to clear a lot of process before it can move. The bubble is intended to escape both at once, with its own economics and permission slips. The standard innovation "bubble" solution famously doesn't work very well. You may solve the problem inside your bubble, but you often can't roll it out to the rest of your company for the original reasons. Everyone is focused on doing their current stuff, and nobody has time for a major change. Our thesis is that there is an entirely different way out of the dilemma this time around. No bubble needed, as long as you follow a simple rule. That rule is, let your people play. Give them back any time they earn from automating their jobs with AI. Then incentivize them to use that time to improve the company's processes. When you see an engineering team announce a 40% productivity boost from adopting AI — a number that's been showing up in plenty of LinkedIn posts lately — your first reaction as a CEO or manager is probably to say, that's awesome, we can do more work now! Or you might simply expect to see 40% more output from the team. Either way, you have just asked them to spend their extra time building faster horses (your current business) instead of letting them go figure out what a car would look like for your company. They gained some productivity from AI, which could have been your ticket out of the Dilemma, and you immediately slurped it back for your existing business. This will get your company killed in the medium to long haul, because your company tomorrow will look almost nothing like it does today. Conway's Law says your software and your org chart mirror each other; as AI rewrites how you build software, the org has to shift to match. But if you're stealing the hours back saved by your employees, then you're not letting your org pivot naturally in the direction it needs to shift. @RealGeneKim and I saw this in person at @arkanalabs a few weeks back. As long as your people know they'll be recognized and rewarded if they improve the company's processes — public credit for cross-team workflow wins, promotion criteria that actually count process improvements, managers who treat freed-up hours as a feature rather than a budget line — then they will use their "play time" to seek out other teams, and start pivoting you to becoming AI-native. This way it can unfold in whatever bespoke way is most natural to your company, rather than in some ivory-tower research bubble. For every company, the way it unfolds will be a bit different. I think of this approach, of giving the time back to the humans who automate parts of their jobs with AI, as the new solution to the Innovator's Dilemma. The old bubble solution was to separate a bunch of people from their regular jobs, and try to give them the freedom to solve the problem in isolation. In contrast, by giving your regular employees their hours back, the innovation bubble is still there, but it's now dispersed across the company, as lots of very tiny bubbles: one bubble per person who has liberated some hours. If you've ever read Slack by DeMarco and Lister, a great book from back in the 90s, then our thesis should resonate. What companies need is to empower their own employees, the ones who actually work together (even across departments)--the ones who know how the business works--to shift the company in the new directions together. Gradually, but with intentionality. You still have the frankly awful problem of token budgets. For every employee you upskill into baseline AI literacy (which I'd define loosely as using coding agents throughout the workday), you've added a non-trivial opex spend — for the heaviest agentic users it can run into five figures a year. I won't sugar-coat it; you need to find that money somehow. I don't have a magic solution, but I'm very happy that other models are catching up to Claude, because they're becoming good enough for real work now. But token budgets alone aren't enough. To live through the Innovator's Dilemma this time around, your employees need a time budget, too. Give it to the ones who earn it using AI, then incentivize them properly, and I think you're headed in roughly the right direction. Thank you for coming to my TED tweet.

We've got more wisdom from Melissa M. Reeve in this continuation of the interview. "We have to explicitly tell our teams: 'I want you to develop skills to be better humans that AI can amplify.' Only after establishing that psychological safety can you begin the structural work of the Hyperadaptive model." Read the rest: buff.ly/fyhwBlZ

We sat down earlier this week with Melissa M. Reeve to talk about her new book, Hyperadaptive. "Agile was a revolution, but it was largely quarantined within technology teams and focused on iterative software delivery. 'Hyperadaptive' is different because it is about rewiring the entire enterprise to evolve at the speed of computation rather than the speed of committees." Read the interview: buff.ly/0GM5UeL

Bill Palmer thought surviving the Phoenix Project launch was the hard part. He was wrong. Now, with market share collapsing and competitors pulling ahead, he has to prove that IT isn't a cost center—it's the company's last hope. Order today: itrev.io/4q9TYvF

📘Hyperadaptive Author: @MelissaMReeve Publisher: @ITRevBooks 📚📕📙📓📘 @LanceScoular The Savvy Navigator🧭🌐@KeyDirections #amazoninfluencer #book #ad #amazonbooks #fromtheauthorsmouth #Hyperadaptive #Rewiring #to #Become #an #AI #Native #Organization amazon.com/Hyperadaptive-…

Hyperadaptive, by Melissa M. Reeve, was released yesterday, and everyone's talking about it! “This is one of the most thoughtful books on AI organizational transformation available today. Hyperadaptive applies all the best principles, from true business agility to AI, with remarkable alignment and connection throughout. Fantastic.” —Ken Spangler, (retired) EVP of IT and CIO of Global Operations Technologies, FedEx Order now: buff.ly/L17nyxk

Melissa M. Reeve's thoughts on AI integration (outlined in her new book, Hyperadaptive) began with another revolution...DevOps. "DevOps lives mostly inside engineering. It rebuilt how software gets shipped, but it didn’t rebuild how the rest of the organization operates around that shipping. AI doesn’t have that luxury. ChatGPT and its successors landed in marketing, finance, customer support, legal, HR, and operations all at once.” Read the article: itrev.io/3Pw4UYm

Today, Hyperadaptive is officially available! Huge congratulations to author Melissa M. Reeve! AI integration is everywhere these days, but if we ignore the human element, our teams won't get past experimentation. Melissa's book breaks down the different stages of becoming hyperadaptive, and shows you how to determine where you are and how to move your organization to the next step. Get it today from your favorite bookseller!

Gene Kim's classic novel has been reimagined across three stunning volumes, brought to life by artist Mike Collins. Together, they form one of the most compelling collections in tech publishing—and now you can own all three! Order now: itrev.io/4q9TYvF

Author Melissa M. Reeve has some truly valuable offerings for those who preorder Hyperadaptive. Unlock exclusive downloads like the AI Integration Handbook and the Hyperadaptive™ Model PDF, get access to her Substack Community, and more! Learn more: itrev.io/3Mho16S

Why should you read Hyperadaptive? “AI presents the largest management challenge in the last century, because leaders can no longer rely on processes they inherited. Within the next five years, as things like coding agents drop the cost of production to nearly zero, leaders will find that every piece of important work will be blocked by legacy processes. This magnificent book shows the way forward, with phenomenal case studies that prove the effectiveness of the guidance.” —Gene Kim, researcher and bestselling author of Vibe Coding, The Phoenix Project, and Wiring the Winning Organization Preorder now: buff.ly/L17nyxk

New article alert! "Why Change Efforts Fail: The Missing Ingredient" looks at Practice Makes Culture, the upcoming book from Christine Hudson and Ronica Roth. Read article: itrev.io/49tMRZs

The operating model becomes the bottleneck. A new article from IT Revolution explains what a Product Operating Model is, why it matters now, and what it takes to actually make the shift. buff.ly/540r4kY

Mik Kersten defined the Product Operating Model in Project to Product. His forthcoming book Output to Outcome takes it further—into what AI does to organizations that haven't made the shift. buff.ly/540r4kY