We’ve done the hard work of creating a solution. It works. It is bright and shiny. It does what it needs to do for the people we serve. Our team is tired, but happy. We sent our solution out into the world. The world’s teeth and claws promptly make a nature-film mess of our solution, hopes and hard work.

There are 9 resources every solution needs to survive: Fluid Hive’s 9Cs. Each resource makes a solution more adaptive and resilient. Creating solid solutions means designing the 9Cs as we’re designing our solution. Creating a solution’s path into the world needs the same care and attention we brought to designing the solution. The 9Cs are a critical part of building that path well.

The 9Cs: capacity, capability, cash, change management, change leadership, communication, collaboration, commitments, and contemplation.

Capacity

Capacity is about having time to do the work. A solution needs a delivery team that was involved in its creation and has dedicated time to roll out the new solution. When the delivery team is involved in creating the solution, design decisions reflect their time constraints. Every solution launches a little broken in ways we did not expect. So, on top of all the things we plan on the delivery team doing, they need capacity for fixing what the world teaches us is wrong with our solution.

Capability

Does the delivery team have the ability to do everything our solution requires so that it functions as expected for the people we serve? If our solution requires data analysis and nobody on the team can tell the difference between an independent and dependent variable, we need that ability.

We want a team able to solve the kinds of problems we will encounter with our solution. Each problem has its own countdown timer. The clock rewards experience. With experience, applying an ability is faster and consumes fewer resources. Capability means having both ability and experience.

Cash

We need two kinds of cash: creation cash and adaptation cash. Acquiring and allocating creation cash is part of creating solutions. Creation cash is also the source of our launch budget. Creation cash gets our solution made and into the world. Adaptation cash is what we’ll need when the world teaches us ways we can improve our solution.

Teaching is a nice way of describing how the world will break our shiny new toys in large and small ways. When those lessons happen, and they happen to every solution, adaptation cash is there so we can buy whatever passes for glue.

Change Management

Why do so many people want innovation without change? Creating and delivering a new service, product or system means people will work and act in new ways. The distance between our old ways and those new ways is the change that needs to be managed. What will we need to do to help people accomplish the learning and experimentation that transforms new ways into old ways? How will we communicate and adjust? How will we know if the transformation is happening? What data do we need? Change management is where we make sure everyone involved in launching a solution has the time, tools, abilities, and support to fulfill their role.

Change Leadership

Change requires dragging something unwieldy uphill over rough terrain in the rain. Leaders can’t remove the incline, but we can influence how steep it is. Want to create a steeper hill? Don’t talk about change-related work in formal and informal ways. Leave change-related risk and work disconnected from compensation structures. Fail to reward necessary risk takers. Pretend we aren’t part of what makes change stick. Ignore our unique responsibility to see and design the systems where change is happening. When a leader makes most of these mistakes, they make a hill into a mountain and a rough walk becomes a very dangerous climb.

Communication

The first part of communication is obvious: people need to talk to each other. People need to be clear about the information they need, and why and when they need it. People need to do the same for the information they will provide and the format that is most useful for the recipient. Less obvious is that the solution needs to speak to people. How will we know if what we’ve launched is performing well?

The solution needs to communicate with us the same way people do. For that to happen, we need to make sure we’ve designed ways for our solution to tell us how things are going. What do we measure? Who is responsible for making sense of those measurements? What post-launch decisions can we anticipate making after we launch, and how can we make sure our solution is providing the evidence we need to make them well?

Collaboration

Launch collaboration is a who and how problem. The teams that create and launch solutions may not be the teams a solution needs to become established. If we did our work well, we designed these teams as we designed the solution with their input. If not, we’ll need to set them up as we launch.

The how is about making sure that the post-launch team members are set up to work well with each other. They are creative teams, but they are creating responses to differences between a solution’s intended and actual performance. We can design these collaborative moments while designing the solution. When the world does strange things with our solution, having simple collaborative structures to adapt means our response time is faster and our responses are better.

Commitments

Voluntold. What does it say about organizations and leadership that spell check didn’t flag the word voluntold? Launching well means that every person the solution needs to succeed is committed to their role in the work. At some point, each person needs to say, “I will [do X] for [someone].” X is a task or collection of tasks that may be one-time or ongoing. Why is there a person placeholder in the formula? We don’t make real commitments to tasks. We make meaningful commitments to people.

Contemplation

If we play the two-kinds-of-X game, then there are two kinds of organizations: maximized and buffered. Maximized organizations operate this way: “If everyone’s time isn’t 100% occupied, 100% of the time, we are wasting money.” If you work at one of these companies, leave. If you lead this way, stop.

When the world offers unexpected opportunities or challenges, what do we do if we are 100% occupied? If you are reaching for the 110% lever, stop. There is no 25th hour. When we’re at 100% and something extra arrives, we flush something to make room; it could be the shiny new arrival or something old, but necessary. That’s the reality. Make sure people committed to solution launch activities have space to think. Keep slack in the system. Your solutions, the people you serve, and your organizational outcomes will thank you. 85% is 100%.

Solutions need Fluid Hive’s 9Cs to launch well and evade the world’s teeth and claws.