A River Runs Through It: Confluences Between Business and Technology

The Importance of Confluence

Confluences are some of the most critical occurrences in our natural world, where water sources merge to create a single flow that brings ecosystems and environments together.  These convergences are where people often choose to settle, serve as lifelines and launch points to new places upstream and downstream, and are access points to new places.  Eventually a downhill gradient brings the river to the ocean, where a greater world is opened up for new opportunities. 

Daily life in business is a series of streams that follow their own natural flow into confluences as well, creating momentum and consequences.  The downhill flow through paths of least resistance embeds these streams into businesses the same way rivers are embedded into rock.  Value comes together at these convergences where the whole is greater than the sum of the individual streams themselves.  Without confluences in business, workstreams are siloed, lacking a diversity and complexity that allows for growth.

Critical Streams and Key Confluences

The most critical streams in business are strategy, people, process, and technology.  Each of these streams has a unique influence on the others where they can create resistance and stall progress, they can remain independent and become a breeding ground for inefficiencies, or they can confluence constructively.  Businesses have a choice on which of these situations plays out and can influence each stream to confluence with the others to produce positive outcomes. 

Critical streams in business will come together on their own, with or without influence.  The choice you have today is what to do with them.  Choosing to ignore key confluences and let them play out on their own prevents access to greater value and will create problems that are difficult to diagnose.  Choosing to influence those confluences creates opportunities to leverage accelerators and force-multipliers within them, building on the competitive advantages of your business.  Unlocking the real potential of your organization comes from this influence and should happen with purpose and intent. 

The influence we have over how streams of business confluence with purpose and intent creates value, opportunity, and advantage.  The influence these confluences have on one another to create a thriving ecosystem is where the term Confluencial comes from. 

Variables in Confluence

Confluences are influenced by many variables, including water sources, gravity, and geography.  Water comes from different sources and may be consistent or seasonal.  Rivers can be spring-fed, dependent on precipitation, or both.  Confluences can be created, diverted, stopped, and guided to particular outcomes with canals, irrigation systems, and dams.  Either way, gravity and geography create a gradient that produces the downhill flow of water.  As volume increases, the power of the river to erode the geography around it increases as well. 

Sources, gravity, and geography are key variables that correlate to conducting business.  Some variables are external and difficult to influence, such as competition, demand, and global economies.  These variables define the environment your business operates in.  Others are internal and you have more control over how they affect your organization.  These are the variables you can use to influence how your confluences create value for your business, customers, and partners.  Over time, this influence creates volume for your business that in turn has an impact on both internal and external variables.

Confluencing Streams of Business

So how do strategy, people, process, and technology fit into this conversation?  Each has its own external and internal variables, flow, sources, and outcomes.  They also have a key impact on each other that create compounding influences.  Stifling the flow of one stream will limit its contribution to the confluence it has with others, thereby limiting the benefits it brings to the ecosystem.  Increasing the flow of one without recognizing its influence can overwhelm other streams with a current that has a disproportionate impact and becomes dominant in the ecosystem. 

The impact that purpose and intent have on the interrelated nature of streams creates confluences that grow the ecosystem itself with balance and positive influence.  A thriving ecosystem in turn yields healthy and bountiful outcomes for your business.  Strategy, people, process, and technology are balanced through a definition of each’s influence on the other as well as a steady hand in guiding them to the expected desirable outcomes.

Strategy will be there whether it is defined or not and will have a downhill impact on other streams.  Poorly defined strategies limit the business by not providing a significant enough gradient to drive the flow of business.  Aggressively pressed strategies with unlimited definitions create a steeper gradient that creates whitewater, rapids, and falls.  In these situations, the current is unnavigable and sweeps away other streams in its vigor.  The goal of strategic confluences is to provide guidance and direction to other streams that influence the speed, volume, and trajectory of their flow.

People have the greatest influence on other streams and are the most critical of the four major streams.  This stream is also the most indicative of the health of the ecosystem itself.  People enact strategies and push them into processes that produce outcomes for your organization.  Without people, perfect and balanced strategies and processes can produce no outcomes.  An organization with a healthy people stream characterized by positive influence, outlook, and engagement has great ability to impact change for the better, accept new circumstances, and adapt with agility.  All of these, representative of high levels of morale and motivation, are the key to effective and efficient businesses.  Conversely, an unhealthy people stream can poison the ecosystem itself with resistance and negativity, leading to constrained results, reactivity, and lack of follow-through.

Processes as a stream are the way in which your business is administered and managed.  The value in its confluences are defined by their ability to create the most efficient way of reaching the most effective results.  Processes are a key component in making fast and accurate decisions which propel the business forward.  Pain points in processes restrict flow unnecessarily and requirements dictate the flow itself.  It is often difficult to differentiate between the two with processes that have obscurities, and often requirements can become pain points as the business evolves and are adapted to create new flows.  Sometimes this is a response to the need for an increase in complexity that is beneficial to the business.  Other times workarounds cause inefficiencies that in turn create drag in the flow.  Strong process streams are transparent and balanced in their approach to the quickest way to add the most value.

Strategy, People, and Processes are naturally occurring streams that create major components of how your business ecosystem functions. Even the most basic businesses operating with pen and paper have these streams.  They flow downhill together through pathways defined by paths of least resistance – which is different than paths of greatest efficiencies.  There is a stream that serves as a tool for influencing the others to maximize both the effectiveness and efficiency of the path of least resistance.

Technology as a Unique Stream

Time has yielded a fourth stream in today’s business environment that allows for additional complexity and value to the overall ecosystem.  This stream is technology and when managed with purpose and intent can help maximize positive outcomes from even the greatest downhill gradients and volumes with clarity, reliability, and predictability.  It can also create catastrophic impacts when it dominates the flow of business, dragging strategy, people, and processes over an unforeseen fall or stifles the flow of other streams by creating budgetary constraints, discouraging the organization, and overburdening resources.

Technology makes things makes happen faster.  Your job in maximizing the benefits this stream has in its confluences with other streams is to ensure that this speed comes in the right places because volume will increase erosion and does not discriminate between eroding positive and negative outcomes.  

What makes our influence on technology unique is that this stream is owned by human hands.  It enables people to accomplish more with less and streamlines processes.  It deepens the streams themselves, allowing for greater volume of business value to come from the same streambeds.  When deployed effectively with purpose and intent, technology creates greater visibility into the business that allows for faster, more accurate decision making. 

Technology can breathe life into an ecosystem in ways that allow the other three streams to evolve into new strategies and ways of working.  While it can create great peril when it is misunderstood, technology can allow for the merging of ecosystems by sharing benefits between verticals, partnerships, and industries.   It is unique in that the others do not need it to exist, but also in the ways in which it can increase the value that each stream adds to the other in ways only you can imagine for your business.

Creating a Confluencial Ecosystem

Influencing the way the streams of strategy, people, process, and technology come together takes an understanding of the smaller streams that converge to define each and their impact on each other.  Bridging the gap between objectives and results takes a knowledge and skillset versed in navigating the waters of change. 

The Confluencial was founded to focus on purposeful and intentional influence over business confluences with a people-first approach that brings transparency and innovation to the forefront of business results.  With this knowledge, philosophy, and approach, we’ve helped countless organizations create thriving ecosystems that sustain the growth, ambitions, and health of their businesses. 

In nature, life, and in business, one thing remains constant. 

“Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it.” (Norman Maclean)