Design APIs for Disobedience
Components & Platforms to Empower Complex Ecosystems
This post is brought to you by platformdesigntoolkit.com and is dispatched in our fortnightly newsletter
It often happened to me to work with organizations willing to establish an API strategy, as if such thing exists for real. In the luckiest cases this strategy is seen, at least, as part of a wider plan to embrace the opportunities of the networked age, in something that people often call a digital transformation plan.
But what’s an approach to APIs, microservices and service componentization that makes sense in an age of increasing complexity and interconnectedness? In the age of …Platforms?
My point here is that there’s no possibility — for an organization today — to define its role autonomously, but that the objective of a modern organization should be that of continuously discover its role dynamically, by interacting with the entities that populate its ecosystem.
APIs and components like microservices can be a powerful set of tools to enhance and enable these interactions but, without questioning what is the value the organization wants to help create, API strategies often fall short.
Paraphrasing Cedric Price: “technology is the answer, but what was the question?”
On January the 31 I spoke at Api Days — “Build sustainable technology, business and society with APIs, Microservices and Containers” — about this topic, above you can see my presentation.
I’ve seen tons of companies — especially large multinational groups — approaching APIs and microservices in a siloed fashion: every business unit or function, looking to encapsulate their elementary capabilities beyond an actionable REST interface, wanted an API with the idea to increase the consumption of the service and monetize: “we need to monetize our APIs!”. That was the cry.
The problem with this approach to APIs is manyfold. First of all, this approach makes you focus on the lower levels of the value chain, it makes you evolve along the pattern of componentization.
It’s all about making it easier to consume service elements that are already provided by your organization. It’s a downward focus, typical of companies falling victim of the stack fallacy: we packetize and expose APIs for services that we are already consuming internally; we just assume that they will be valuable for someone else: “they’ve been valuable to us!”. It feels good, but it’s all about over valuing what we already know.
While we can be tempted to operate that way, it’s fairly clear that the most difficult task of innovation today is not to make the consumption of existing assets more efficient. A modern organization should aim at discovering new and evolving needs of users inhabiting higher layers of the value chain or, to frame it in platform thinking perspective, to understand what potential resides outside the boundaries of our organization, in our ecosystem, and how we can empower it.
We are used to the industrial perspective: companies make products and consumers consume them, the more a product (or service) sells, the more economies of scale kick in, and the more money we make.
As the industrial age is departing, and we’re all victim of the increasing volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity of the world, we understand that a better way for a company to approach a market opportunity is, first, to identity all the entities at play, and then to design tools and contexts that help unleash the ecosystem’s potential in direct interactions.
Companies don’t sell consumables anymore: they provide opportunities for new experiences, new ways to connect, to converse. Ultimately, modern organizations extract value from allowing these interactions.
What is an organization all about?
Do we understand that the organization is no more about just employees and controlled resources? Do we agree that a modern business is about continuously “organizing” value creation in markets and society?
As the pervasivity of technology enhanced the potential to create value at the edge of systems, and reduced the cost of coordination to almost zero, we need to realize that a company must look at what’s “inside” and “outside”, with the same level of attention and with the same possibility to leverage.
Truly speaking, there’s no more an inside and outside to a company if not for liability issues: you may need to hire employees — or just need to have a CEO — because of regulations or compliance but, in reality, everyone can work for you now. if you just have a set of incentives that is convincing enough.
Strategies must be boundaryless.
Organizations are inter-connected in ecosystems. Ecosystems of organizations are connected in larger ecologies of value creation and eventually to our planet & global society.
Innovating upwards, up towards Ecologies of Value Creation
So while APIs and Microservices play a huge part in an internal unbundling strategy — tearing down internal barriers in an organization, transforming it into a marketplace of entities interacting — they can, in the process, also dissolve the boundaries with the external: when an interface is available, why don’t just open it to anyone?
But what happens once you’ve APIs and components? You’ll fall short of use and business cases pretty soon, if you don’t have a convincing vision of what value needs to be created in your ecosystem and beyond, in society, and how to enable continuous and sustainable growth in the larger system.
It’s not even just a matter of service design as it’s not enough to envision a customer experience and bring it to the market, anymore.
This brings a totally new perspective: you need to have an holistic vision of how larger ecologies of value creation work. You need to try to be one of the hubs of these ecologies: it’s great to provide elements for an interactive infrastructure (like APIs or microservices), but you also need to have, and share, a wider narrative.
Your APIs must be channels: for allowing interactions between parties, not just with you.
Your microservices need to give open access to data and insights, providing opportunities for learning and improvement to everyone.
Platform thinking is about companies evolving from providing consumption opportunities towards providing value creation opportunities.
Platform Experiences and Ecosystem Disobedience
In a market where the potential is decidedly growing at the edge, the role of a company cannot be defined anymore in isolation (i.e. I produce — you, the customer, consume): the overall strategy, vision and roadmap must instead be adaptive and developed together with the ecosystem, in interactions.
To redefine their role in the complex reality of today, companies must depart the idea to provide “solutions”, and think more about how they can raise the right questions, craft the right “invitations” to interact, explore, create the new.
While anyone that is designing a platform strategy should aim, at first, at designing harmonized and integrated platform experiences, in the longer term, platform strategies need to leave open possibilities of co-evolution, remix, reinterpretation.
It’s true that integrated experiences are the essence of a platform strategy: a combination between peer to peer interactions and supporting services and features (including components and APIs) provided by the platform. This approach is going to be crucial in the moment we create the strategy, and when we try to achieve growth by generating network effects: these experiences need to be replicable, scalable, simple.
In the longer term, on the other hand, a platform strategy for true ecosystem development will need to evolve. Allowing ecosystems to express disobedience — diverge and recombine elements — is needed to evolve into something new, more valuable, to point out a new direction, in ever changing reality.
Monitoring these mutating interactions, carefully listening to the new ways ecosystem use the provided elements to create new value: here’s how a shaping organization learns how to support and adapt to the ecosystem’s evolution.
- The more you understand the Ecosystem’s potential the more the integrated platform experiences you offer will help you climb the value chain.
- The more remixable elements you’ll offer (through APIs, microservices and loose platform features) the more the Ecosystem will be able to create disobedient experiences on top of the value chain: within time you’ll be able to integrate them in the flagship platform experience.
A good example of this pattern, can today be seen in Airbnb continuous integration of additional experiences, institutionalizing emergent (disobedient) behaviors happening in the Ecosystem: travel experiences on top of room rentals, then host concierge services, restaurant booking and who knows what comes next. Airbnb is continuously building new experiences on top of an increasing understanding of its Ecosystem.
Another good example, maybe more in line with today’s context of componentized services like APIs, could be the story of how Amazon web services intriduced Elastic Map Reduce:
But let us suppose you were a provider of utility computing infrastructure services (e.g. something like Amazon EC2). Then not only does the provision of these services enable rapid creation of higher order systems by encouraging experimentation through a reduction in the cost of failure but also the supplier has direct access to information on consumption.
Let us suppose that one of these new higher orders systems (e.g. “big data” systems built with hadoop) started to diffuse. Through consumption of the component infrastructure service you could detect this diffusion in close to real time and hence rapidly decide to commoditize any new activity to your own component service e.g. in this case by introducing something like Amazon Elastic Map Reduce.
Naturally, you’d be accused of eating the ecosystem if you did this repeatedly but at the same time your new component services would help grow the ecosystem and create new higher order services.
From Simon Wardley — Ecosystems
In conclusion, when you think about your API, microservices and — more generally — your ecosystem development strategy in a complex and unpredictable world, you don’t want to be practical, linear and rational.
When you mess with complex system, as Nora Bateson once said, the goal is not to “crack the code, but rather to catch the rhythm.”
“In defense of a world that is characterized by mutual learning between variables in a given context- a world that does not stay the same, a world that won’t be mechanized or modeled, in defense of that world I maintain that nothing could be more practical than to become more familiar with the patterns of movement life requires. The goal is not to crack the code, but rather to catch the rhythm.
[…] At the edges of the given patterns, there are liminal zones. The boundaries. This is where interaction takes place. These are the places where the directions of potential pathways as yet uncharted live.
[…]The larger ecology of the situations always drowns the fragmented attempts at controlling it. “
Nora Bateson, Practicality in Complexity
Thanks Ron Kersic, Taoufik Vallipuram and Eugenio Battaglia for the kind reviews and suggestions.
>> Everything we create is Free and Open, licensed in Creative Commons!
Show support by clapping this post 👏
Do you want to learn Platform Design? Check out our Masterclass in Brussels on June 7th and 8th! A previous participant said the master class: “really changed my perception of what is possible with platform thinking.”
Photo by Christopher Burns on Unsplash
