GLOSSARY OF TERMS

Exponential Organization: An ExO is a purpose-driven, agile, and scalable organization that uses accelerating technologies to digitize, dematerialize, democratize, and demonetize its products and services, resulting in a 10x performance increase over its non-ExO peers.

OpenExO: OpenExO is the world’s leading global ExO transformation ecosystem, made up of more than 25,000 clients, investors, consultants, coaches, collaborators, tech leaders, and innovation specialists. Together, we are committed to helping organizations, institutions, and people transform the world for an exponentially better future by implementing and evolving the ExO model and practices.

OpenExO Community: The OpenExO Community is a place where exponential transformation specialists collaborate and interact with the opportunities that exponential technologies make available. This involves mindset transformation, business model transformation, and knowledge of how to harness exponential technologies.

ExO Ecosystem: The ExO Ecosystem encompasses all organizations that are working towards creating Exponential Organizations. This includes the OpenExO Community and beyond the community, including organizations that traditionally would be considered competition.

ExO Model: ExO Model = ExO Attributes (ExO Attributes = MTP + 5 internal attributes + 5 external attributes). The ExO Model is comprised of 11 components or attributes. ExO attributes are the building blocks that allow you to create an Exponential Organisation with global reach and impact. They leverage existing and emerging technologies that enable an organization to access and manage abundance in the form of available resources, potential clients, or useful information. They are the practices that set industry leaders apart. An overarching Massive Transformative Purpose (MTP) defines the goal that the organization strives to achieve. The ExO Model was created by studying Exponential organizations.

ExO Attributes: ExO Attributes are the building blocks that allow you to create an Exponential Organization with global reach and impact. They leverage existing and emerging technologies that enable an organization to access and manage abundance in the form of available resources, potential clients, or useful information. The ExO Attributes are MTP + SCALE + IDEAS. (These are defined below.)

Massive Transformation Purpose (MTP): The MTP reflects an organization’s aspiration—the core purpose of its existence. It describes the change in the world that you want to achieve while recognizing that it will not be accomplished in the short term. It inspires action, expresses your passions, and creates an emotional connection that drives you and others toward meaningful, positive change.

SCALE Attributes: These attributes help manage leverage abundance that exists outside of the organization. The attributes are Staff on Demand, Community and Crowd, Algorithms & Artificial Intelligence, Leveraged Assets, and Engagement.

Staff on Demand: The Staff on Demand attribute relies on a pool of prequalified workers hired on an as-needed basis to conduct operational elements of your core business. Responsibilities range from simple tasks to complex work and may even include mission-critical processes.

Community and Crowd: Community, in the ExO context, is made up of a large global group of individuals who are passionate about your MTP and are directly involved in the main functions of your organization. They are loyal to a shared goal and devoted to solving the grand challenges surrounding your organization’s purpose.

Artificial Intelligence and Algorithms: An Algorithm is a step-by-step set of instructions used to automate a task or solve a specific problem. Artificial Intelligence (AI) explores how algorithms can be made “intelligent,” allowing digital systems to learn to solve problems without predetermined instructions and discover solutions to new problems without human intervention. AI enables computer systems to behave or “think” like humans by learning to improve performance over time.

Leveraged Assets: “Leveraged and shared assets” is the practice of renting or sharing assets—even those that are mission-critical—to allow an organization to stay nimble and unencumbered, to begin rapidly, and to scale with minimum friction. Ideally, LSA also lowers the marginal cost of supply—to virtually zero in the case of a highly scaled model. By not owning physical or digital property, an ExO can remove the costs associated with managing that property, along with all related infrastructure costs.

Engagement: Engagement is the use of techniques like gamification, incentive prizes, and—more recently—crypto economics to keep stakeholders interested, involved, and increasingly committed to an organization’s MTP or shared purpose. Through Engagement, ExOs gain the loyalty of their customers and Community and convert Crowd into Community. Engagement helps to create virtuous, positive feedback loops—which in turn allows for faster growth through innovation and customer and community loyalty. Companies like Google, Airbnb, Uber, eBay, Yelp, GitHub, and Twitter all leverage different Engagement mechanisms. 

IDEAS Attributes: The IDEAS Attributes are internally focused and enable organizations to manage abundance and drive culture, enabling them to grow exponentially. These attributes are Interfaces, Dashboards, Experimentation, Autonomy, and Social Technologies.

Interfaces: In an ExO context, “Interfaces” refers to the automation of one or more SCALE attributes. Interfaces are the matching and filtering processes—using Artificial Intelligence and Algorithms, as well as automated workflows—that allow an organization to translate an abundance of data into precise and meaningful information that can be acted upon. Interfaces are the bridge between the external, SCALE drivers of exponential growth (the internal, IDEAS drivers for stabilization. An early example of interfaces are APIs, or application programming interfaces. 

Dashboards: Traditional business reports focus on past events, while dashboards provide real-time information and can even make predictions. Dashboards are crucial for Exponential Organizations (ExOs) as they enable rapid decision-making in a fast-changing environment.

There are two types of dashboards: external and internal. External dashboards, similar to an automobile dashboard, present engagement metrics for early-stage companies and financial metrics for mature ones. They utilize leaderboards to drive community behavior and engagement, such as Peloton’s competitions. Internal dashboards, like OKRs (Objectives and Key Results), facilitate collaborative goal-setting and real-time progress tracking. Unlike traditional KPIs, OKRs provide continuous insights into performance, aligning the entire enterprise toward its goals.

Experimentation: Experimentation is the means by which EXOs make data-driven decisions. Each experiment creates a set of learnings that can be used to improve a product, service, and/or process or test a new product or service. Experimentation thrives inside a culture of imagination and risk-taking and enables significant breakthroughs and non-linear growth. Historically, most decisions inside an organization were made by experts and consultants based on their “experience” or “intuition.” Often, such decisions were made while flying the banner of “slow and steady wins the race.”

Moonshots are the ultimate form of Experimentation, wherein an ExO, directionally inspired by its MTP, converts a sequence of successful experiments into large, funded initiatives with an audacious endpoint. As the name suggests, Moonshots carry considerable expense and risk, but they also represent tremendous potential payoffs, propelling the company that much closer to realizing its MTP. 

Autonomy: Autonomy is an organizational approach characterized by self-organized, multidisciplinary teams that operate with decentralized authority and, ideally, self-select their work—all in service of hitting OKRs and the company’s MTP and Moonshot(s). This approach stands in stark contrast to the traditional hierarchical workplace. Autonomous ExOs are flatter, populated by highly motivated self-starters who are empowered to innovate.

Social Technologies: Social Technologies encourage and optimize peer-to-peer, collaborative interaction in an ExO. Social Technologies encompass communication tools (i.e., social messaging and discussion forums, like Zoom, Slack, Notion, Google Docs, etc.), collaboration tools (such as cloud-based document management for sharing and real-time editing), and workflow tools (to manage tasks and activity streams).

EXOS: EXOS is a cryptographic token that provides a way to access the resources and capabilities of the ExO Ecosystem required for transformation in the face of disruption. It’s used in places like the OpenExO Platform to deliver transformational impact.

ExO profile: This is your profile on the OpenExO Platform. This profile is available publically and can be shared with people that are not in the OpenExO Community.

Immune System: Any time a large organization attempts to innovate or transform itself, the corporate immune system—certain employees and processes hard-wired to prevent organizational transformation—will always attack.

The corporate immune system does its job for a good reason: established organizations usually have a working business, which is important to maintain. The goal here isn’t to kill the immune system. Instead, it is to manage it.

ExO Canvas: The ExO Canvas is a management template that helps visionaries, innovators, top executives, and entrepreneurs design agile organizations by leveraging exponentially accelerating technologies. Use the ExO Canvas to design a new ExO or to implement the ExO framework within an existing organization.

Abundance: Traditional business models are based on scarcity, where value comes from selling a product or service that is limited in supply. Exponential technologies, however, generate an abundance of everything.

Abundance360 (A360): A year-round mastermind run by Peter Diamandis. This is Singularity University’s highest-level leadership program. More details are available at www.a360.com. 

6Ds: Concept used to describe a chain reaction of technological progress that leads to both upheaval and opportunity.

6Ds: Digitized: Anything that becomes digitized—representable by ones and zeros—can be accessed, shared, and distributed by computer. It takes on the same exponential growth seen in computing.

6Ds: Deceptive: Exponential trends aren’t easily spotted in the early days. Growth is deceptively slow until it begins to be measured in whole numbers.

6Ds: Disruptive: Digital Technologies outperform previous non-digital models in both effectiveness and cost, disrupting existing markets for a product or service.

6Ds: Dematerialized: The need for bulky or expensive single-use physical products—radio, camera, GPS, video, phone maps—disappears as these items are incorporated into smartphones.

6Ds: Demonetized: As technology becomes cheaper, sometimes to the point of being free, money is increasingly removed from the equation.

6Ds: Democratized: Once something is digitized, more people can have access to it. Everyone has access to powerful technologies, giving individuals and entities the opportunity to create the next big breakthrough.

Business Model Canvas: Business Model Canvas is a tool for developing new or documenting existing business models on one page. It is made up of nine elements or blocks: customer segments, value proposition, channel, customer relationship, revenue streams, key resources, key activities, key partners, and cost structures.

Design Thinking: A design methodology that provides a solution-based approach to solving problems. It’s extremely useful in tackling complex problems that are ill-defined or unknown by understanding the human needs involved, re-framing the problem in human-centric ways, creating many ideas in brainstorming sessions, and adopting a hands-on approach in prototyping and testing.

An early adopter: An early adopter is an individual or business that uses a new product or technology before others, shares your vision, and is willing to try your MVP even though it may not yet have been perfected.

ExO Advisors: Provide micro-consulting sessions to clients and fellow ExO Ecosystem members about topics within their subject matter expertise.

ExO Workshop: An event designed to help participants understand the ExO framework and gain experience using it. It can be run for one organization or as an event featuring participants from different firms. Companies then have the option of running the complete ExO Sprint to achieve real transformation. Workshops serve as an introduction to the disruptive forces shaping our world and a new type of organization set to succeed in the rapidly changing marketplace—an “Exponential Organization”—ExO.

The ExO workshop can be run for various group sizes with a minimum of 10 participants. For groups of more than 50 people, paying an additional facilitator is recommended. The workshop is delivered by one in-person Certified ExO Trainer and may additionally include a number of virtual ExO Coaches and ExO Advisors as appropriate (to be specified in the final design).

ExO Sprint: The ExO Sprint provides a learn-by-doing approach to finding a business model that connects with abundance, overcomes the challenges organizations typically encounter when attempting transformation, and builds innovation capability into your teams. ExO Sprints result in actionable ExO projects that, once completed, transform an existing business into an Exponential Organization—or even a set of them. The ExO Sprint includes two streams of activity. The first, the Edge Stream, focuses on developing initiatives outside the existing organization and business lines. The second, the Core Stream, emphasizes developing initiatives to be implemented within the current organizations. The ExO Sprint takes place for 10 weeks.

ExO Sprint Methodology: The ExO Sprint Methodology is a 10-week process to allow organizations to transform both the core of the organization and to build exponential initiatives on the edge. The process comprises of the ExO Attributes + coaching + use of search-oriented innovation methodologies—i.e., design sprints, lean + consulting on exponential technology to become an Exponential Organization.

ExO Sprint Stream: Core: It is focused on innovation—adapting to external industry disruption without changing the existing business model (so as to avoid triggering an immune system reaction).

ExO Sprint Stream: Edge: It is focused on disruption—on creating the next generation of organizations (new businesses outside of the existing organization), which will eventually lead the industry.

Awake Session: A half-day in-person session for an extended audience (C-suite, management, and other employees) to learn about opportunities from exponential technologies, linear versus exponential thinking, and disruption risk. This session explains the strategies powering the world’s fastest-growing companies—the ExO Attributes—and how they can be profitably implemented into an organization.

Align Workshop: An interactive two-day in-person session where Sprint teams work with their ExO Coaches to first evaluate the organization’s status quo and then start using the ExO methodology to brainstorm and validate new business ideas. Equality within the teams allows members to unshackle their creativity and exercise skills they usually suppress in their jobs.

Disrupt Session: An intensive one-day session where teams pitch their initiatives to a panel of their own senior executives, along with ExO Ecosystem members who have extensive start-up experience. It’s like a full day of Shark Tank to help your teams strengthen and rework their “half-baked” ideas.

Exponential Organizations 2014 (Book): First book in the ExO series, it outlines changes taking place in the world due to exponential technologies, the consequences of resisting disruptive innovation in the business environment, and discusses a new type of exponential organization, what makes them exponential. Authors: Salim Ismail, Michael S. Malone, Yuri van Geest

Exponential Transformation (Book): Second book in the ExO series. A how-to manual for those wanting practical advice on how to implement the ExO Sprint Methodology. Authors: Francisco Palao, Michelle Lapierre, Salim Ismail

Lean Startup: A methodology for developing businesses and products, which aims to shorten product development cycles and rapidly discover if a proposed business model is viable; this is achieved by adopting a combination of business-hypothesis-driven Experimentation, interactive product releases, and validated learning.

Minimum Viable Product (MVP): The MVP is a kind of applied experiment to determine the simplest product that will allow the team to go to market and see how users respond.

Moore’s Law: Computing power continuously doubles in capacity and performance while decreasing in cost.