Everett Harper - Move to the Edge, Declare it Center

The process of Move to the Edge is most important when the context suddenly changes. When I spoke on a panel on Business Transformation in September 2020 with leaders from Accenture, The Gap, and Salesforce, I learned that the pandemic sparked more investment in digital transformation in 3 months than in the prior 10 years. The methods of Move to the Edge are preparation for these shifts, so that leaders can make the right investments, aimed at the right outcomes, for the right purpose.

As I've developed this framework, I've noticed that the edge also carries an emotional response. For some, the edge is scary and dangerous, a misstep away from falling off a cliff – and thus should be avoided. For others, it's a thrilling, dopamine‐generating experience that is clarifying and addicting. The edge can have all of those connotations, but the core is that the boundary of one's knowledge, experience, and practice is the edge. Because the edge is both a cognitive and emotional experience, the Move to the Edge, Declare It Center framework has practices – Exterior and Interior – that address both.

The process of Declare It Center is about taking new information and insights and building operations to systematize, scale, and share these innovations so that they deliver the desired outcome. The infrastructure that supports Declare It Center enables individuals, teams, and companies to sustain their work with less individual effort.

One of my favorite examples of infrastructure is the process for painting the Golden Gate Bridge. The schedule for painting the bridge starts with the same section on the same day each year. They progress from one section to another until they reach the end of the bridge, and then they begin again on the first section one year later on the same date. This system is easy to follow, is predictable, and achieves the outcome of having a freshly painted landmark without recalculating the schedule each year.

I became interested in infrastructure after Truss helped fix Healthcare.gov. I began to recognize that our approach to solving complex problems seemed to have a pattern. As I mentioned in the introduction, agile development describes an iterative, customer‐centric pattern of building that Truss uses successfully with our clients. However, agile development doesn't describe the full story of its impact on people who aren't directly building software. I became curious if there were concepts or theories that captured some of the social psychology of this dynamic, because as many leaders will attest, the hardest part of change is not the software – it's the people.

In 2015, I discovered a concept called infrastructuralism . Infrastructuralism is based on the observation that there is a dynamic relationship between software, architecture, and the experience that humans want from that software. This fit the pattern we observed at Truss. Designing an infrastructure that coordinates people, technology, and operations is a key part of Declare It Center. It is a better match to the challenge posed by complex problems because it assumes there are unknowns, and it creates a space to engage multiple perspectives in order to make higher‐quality decisions.

While infrastructuralism was an important construct, it didn't inspire action. In short, it wasn't a verb. That evening, watching a documentary about Andy Warhol, I learned the verbs to describe our practice at Truss. Now it's time to share that practice with you.

1 1.Listen to the album Segundo, by Juana Molina. Recorded almost entirely in the madrugada, she reflects this time of night with complex soundscapes, suffused in sleep, yet full of wit and reflection in lyrics.

2 2.Andy Warhol: A Documentary Film, directed by Ric Burns, 2006.

3 3.The Factory was Andy Warhol's studio, but it became a cultural magnet for the avant‐garde in New York City, creating and defining cultural trends for the remainder of the decade.

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