The Next Next Common Sense
a “Values Screen” that assesses alignment with core principles before considering operational details, ensuring tactical flexibility within value boundaries. Principle persistence. Organizations deliberately maintain consis- tent decision principles even while changing specific applications. When professional services firm McKinsey navigates market shifts, it applies its longstanding “Client Impact” principle to entirely new service areas, maintaining coherence across diverse offerings. Tactical experimentation protection. Organizations create safe spaces for tactical variation within value boundaries. When technology company Google implements its “20% time,” it explicitly protects experi- mentation that aligns with the company’s mission “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful,” even when specific experiments challenge current business models. These approaches create what strategy theorist David Teece called “dynamic capabilities”—the ability to reconfigure tactical approaches while maintaining strategic coherence.
Diverse tempo management
Organizations that master complexity operate at multiple tempos simultaneously, with some elements changing rapidly while others evolve more gradually. This diversity creates stability without stagnation and dynamism without chaos. Technology company Salesforce demonstrates this tempo diversity through its “Multitrack Development” approach. Rather than changing all elements at the same pace, Salesforce deliberately manages different tempos for different aspects of its business—rapid iteration in product features, measured evolution in platform architecture, and gradual refine- ment in core values. This diversity creates what CEO Marc Benioff calls “layered stability”—different rates of change for different organizational elements. This tempo diversity manifests in several organizational practices:
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