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What is pull?
Pull is the ability to draw out people and resources as needed to address the opportunities and challenges of an uncertain world. Pull gives us access to what we need, when we need it, even if we’re not quite sure what “it” is, and allows us to harness and unleash the forces of attraction, influence, and serendipity. Using pull, we can create the conditions by which individuals, teams, and even institutions can achieve their potential in less time and with more impact. The power of pull provides a key to how all of us—individually and collectively—can turn challenge and stress into opportunity and reward as digital technology remakes our lives.
Pull is about expanding our awareness of what is possible and evolving new dispositions, mastering new practices, and taking new actions to realize those possibilities. It’s about figuring out how to be systematic in how we combine work and life to pursue our passions, how to find others who share our passion but bring different experiences and perspectives to challenging performance needs, and how to create conditions where we’re more likely to happen upon interesting people, resources, and opportunities – even as we contribute the same chances to others. We all pursue some of these techniques—searching, tapping into networks of one kind or another, connecting with people who share our passions—but almost none of us do it systematically or even consciously. And few of us know how powerful these ideas and techniques, properly deployed, have the potential to be.
“Show me the stuff that I really need that I don’t even know exists,” isn’t much of a search string. Access only truly works when we know what we’re looking for.
Pull works at three primary levels, each of which builds on the others. At the most basic level, pull helps us to find and access people and resources when we need them. At a second level, pull is the ability to attract people and resources to us that are relevant and valuable, even if we were not even aware before that they existed. Think here of serendipity rather than search. Finally, in a world of mounting pressure and unforeseen opportunities, we need to cultivate a third level of pull – the ability to pull from within ourselves the insight and performance required to more effectively achieve our potential. We can use pull to learn faster and translate that learning into rapidly improving performance, not just for ourselves, but for the people we connect with – a virtuous cycle that we can participate in. All three levels of pull are connected and enabled by a continually evolving and sequentially built “pull platform” that helps individuals and institutions make the most of pull’s possibilities and potential.
The first level of pull: Access
The first and simplest level of pull is all about flexible access – the ability to fluidly find and get to the people and resources when and where we need them. Access involves the ability to find, learn about, and connect with resources (people, products, and knowledge) on an as-needed basis to address unanticipated needs. As the world is remade by digital technology—a process we have termed the Big Shift— this capability becomes increasingly central to our survival, much less our success. As the convergence of digital infrastructures and public-policy regimes supporting economic liberalisation lead to intensified competition and growing economic pressure, it becomes increasingly difficult to forecast demand, requiring non-push based approaches to resource mobilisation. Rather than pushing resources based on reasonably accurate demand forecasts, we must find ways to access a broader range of resources in shorter periods of time to respond to unanticipated events as disruptions become ever more frequent. From something that was nice to have, access is becoming essential to survival in an increasingly unpredictable world.
PULL PLATFORMS
Access is particularly challenging in the business world, where institutional boundaries have tended to limit visibility and the ability to connect with needed resources. What we call pull platforms can help us to overcome institutional barriers in the business world as well as to expand our reach in our personal lives.
Pull platforms are designed to flexibly accommodate diverse providers and users of resources. SAP’s Developer Network—a collaborative ecosystem consisting of customers, business partners, experts, and independent parties, many of whom are organized in “communities of innovation” that focus on particular performance challenges or opportunities)—is one good example.3
These platforms are open-ended and designed to evolve based on the learning and the changing needs of the participants. “Platforms” in the literal sense are tangible foundations; here we are using the term metaphorically to describe frameworks for orchestrating a set of resources that can be configured quickly and easily to serve a broad range of needs. Think of Travelocity’s travel service, or the emergency ward of a hospital, and you will see the contrast with the hardwired push programs. Emergency wards, of course, exist to help only in dire situations. Yet they demonstrate the feasibility and value of pull-oriented approaches in more traditional settings. In the emergency room, the medical personnel make skilled decisions as to the time necessity of their interventions and are ready to pull from and mobilize a wide variety of resources that are on hand to help whoever comes in with a problem.
The contrast between push programs and pull platforms is quite stark. Pull platforms tend to be much more modular in design. Of course, push programs can also be modular, but the modules are specified for the benefit of the provider and usually tightly integrated. On pull platforms the modules are for the convenience of the participants in the platform. For example, many “open university” initiatives allow students to take courses (which are “modules” in a degree-granting program) online whenever they choose, in different sequences and groupings, giving maximum flexibility to the student. Modules are created to help to make resources and activities more accessible in flexible ways, since the core assumption of pull platforms is that the needs of participants cannot be well anticipated in advance. In pull platforms, the modules are designed to be loosely coupled, with interfaces that help users to understand what the module contains and how it can be accessed. Because of this loosely coupled modular design, pull platforms can accommodate a much larger number of diverse participants. In fact, pull platforms tend to have increasing returns dynamics – the more participants and modules the platform can attract, the more valuable the platform becomes.
In many cases, pull platforms are initially deployed to serve a specific need, but, because of the flexible design, these platforms rapidly evolve in unexpected directions and end up serving a broad range of needs. Instant-messaging networks were initially deployed to help teens and hackers to communicate more rapidly, but they are now actively used by financial traders who want to gain an edge in rapidly moving financial markets. The design of these platforms is emergent, shaped by the participants themselves as their own needs evolve. This kind of organic growth is very appealing, on the one hand, because it makes the most of a company’s initial investment as other participants contribute. It’s somewhat scary, on the other hand, for managers who are used to controlling what takes place. Who knows? Perhaps the community will start talking about or even recommending competing products. Yet companies like SAP have found they can influence and shape the direction in which the community goes—so that it creates the most value for all the participants—without over-controlling things.
*stay tune for the other The second level of pull: Attract
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