Does your company have the makings of an exponential organization?

How likely is your organization to be challenged by disruption? The ExQ (Exponential Quotient) diagnostic survey is the perfect tool for gauging where your company is in its exponential journey, and we've just redesigned it to be more powerful than ever.

First launched in 2015, the ExQ (Exponential Quotient) was designed to provide organizations with a definitive score and quantitative framework for understanding their flexibility and overall ability to rapidly adapt to industry changes, emerging technologies, and other exponential innovations.

Find out your organization's ExQ score here.

In the years since, we’ve seen some of the world’s largest and most influential organizations ranked by their ExQ—including both the Fortune and FTSE 100.

What’s become overwhelmingly apparent, is that the companies with the highest ExQs (i.e. those that possess the greatest number of attributes and characteristics found in Exponential Organizations or ExOs) consistently outperform industry and earnings projections as well as their competitors.

In fact, we ranked GitHub #1 on our first list of the top 100 exponential organizations (ExOs) a few years ago. Microsoft bought them for $7.5 billion in 2018. They had 800 employees at the time, 31 million users, and they didn't produce any of the content which made them so valuable. It’s not a coincidence.

What’s different about the new ExQ?

In this newest iteration, the questions and parameters at the core of this 25-question diagnostic test have been updated to reflect the evolution of the ExO Methodology over the last four years.

What remains unchanged is that each question has been built around one or more of the 11 core attributes of Exponential Organizations. The most important is the MTP, or massive transformative purpose. This is the passion that motivates people both inside and outside the company. An example is Google's mission to "Organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful."

The rest of the attributes are divided into two categories, internal and external, and are represented by the acronyms IDEAS and SCALE. To be considered an ExO, an organization must have an MTP plus at least four of the ten attributes.

Is your organization leveraging exponential attributes?

Along with determining your organization's ExQ, one of the first steps to being able to leverage any asset or characteristic is understanding it at its most basic. Here's a brief overview of the each of the 10 attributes and the role they play within an ExO.

SCALE

These five attributes allow your organization to tap into the sharing economy. They are: Staff on Demand, Community & Crowd, Algorithms, Leveraged Assets, Engagement

Staff on Demand
Leverage external workers rather than “owning” employees in order to increase speed, functionality, and flexibility while decreasing fixed costs. Uber drivers are an example of staff on demand.

Community & Crowd
Attract, engage, and leverage a community whose like-mindedness inspires support, adding creativity, innovation, validation, and even funding. GitHub's community created all of the content that made them so valuable to Microsoft.

Algorithms
Leverage automated functions, including machine learning and deep learning, to get new insights about customers, products, and processes.

Leveraged Assets
Access, rent, share, or otherwise outsource assets to stay nimble and reduce capital expenditures. Airbnb offers millions of room across the globe without owning any of them.

Engagement
Leverage outside interest through gamification, digital reputation systems, and incentive prizes to create network effects and positive feedback loops.

IDEAS

These five attributes allow your organization to manage the abundance you've captured. They are: Interfaces, Dashboards, Experimentation, Autonomy, Social Technologies

Interfaces
Customized filtering and matching to process the output of external attributes (SCALE) into the internal organization. Interfaces include what your customer sees, as well as integrations with other apps behind the scenes.

Dashboards
Make essential company and employee metrics accessible in real-time. Measuring the right KPIs speeds up your decision making.

Experimentation
Learn as rapidly and inexpensively as possible, in order to decide where to place your bigger bets. Digital-first companies like Google and Amazon were built with experimentation at their core. Legacy companies are trying to learn these skills.

Autonomy
Flat reporting structure allowing individual employees and/or self-organizing, multidisciplinary teams to operate effectively.

Social Technologies
Leverage collaborative tools to have real-time conversations with transparency and connection across the organization.

Finding & Leveraging Your Organization's ExQ

Like we've mentioned before, calculating your organization's ExQ is a critical first step in determining what it will take to successfully make the leap from "traditional and linear" to exponential—to becoming the disruptor, instead of the disrupted.

In order to seek change, embrace exponential technologies, and adapt in real time—there is an undeniable need to recognize the factors shaping your organization as it currently exists.

Without a clear understanding where your organization is—it becomes nearly impossible to chart a path to where your organization wants to be.

Making transformation from the disrupted to the disruptor is never a simple one—but it is always a transformation worth making. Are you ready to find your organization's ExQ? Click here to take the ExQ Diagnostic Survey.

For a deep dive into Exponential Organizations, check this recording of a recent webinar we hosted with Mike Lingle of ExO Works.

Image by Jarretera / Shutterstock.com