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Venturing on the Frontiers – A simple guide.
Originally uploaded by Michael Lewkowitz

Venturing on the frontiers is about the early stages of taking on big challenges. It’s a space where conventional models to planning and management prove ineffective. It’s the place where entrepeneurs trust their ‘gut’ and face the challenges with an unrelenting push forward. And it’s the place from which the greatest change can come about.

I’ve been tapping my own experience, researching into systems science and talking with some of North America’s leading venture investors who are themselves pushing the frontiers. Through all of that I’ve emerged with an understanding that I’ve tried to capture to the right. Essentially it describes a venture as a set of spaces (‘founding agreement‘ which gives rise to a ‘magic box‘ which operates within certain ‘realms of relevance‘). Venturing then is the process of ‘framing‘ those spaces, ‘planning’ immediate action, and ‘connecting‘ to get things done and evolve the spaces. Collectively that led me to the following set of principles for venturing on the frontiers:

• Create spaces for things to happen
• Make it simple and accessible
• Tend to connections and connecting
• Keep venturing

I’ve published the image under a creative commons license so please feel free to use and build from it accordingly. And as always, this is but a snapshot of understanding and bound to evolve… so please do get in touch with your reflections, experiences, and suggestions.

I’ll publish future posts on the implications for ventures and venture investors who are pushing the frontiers. Don’t expect magic bullets, but rather a prompting of some productive questions. If anything this has reminded me is that there are no answers, only questions… and asking the right ones can make all the difference.

One of the surprising things that I came out of my latest exploration into the frontiers of venturing and venture investing is a set of definitions. I’m actually not one that likes to debate definitions ad infinitum but I found I needed to clarify things to be able to have meaningful conversations going forward. So here, is what I’ve come up with… for now (I’ll keep updating this definitions as the evolve so feel free to check-back or link here for reference).

• Venture: An agreement among people to do things in service of a purpose and according to a set of values.
• Venturing: The process of creating and evolving a venture.
• Venturer: A person primarily involved in or responsible for venturing.
• Operator: A person primarily involved in or responsible for operating a venture.
• Entrepreneur: A venturer that also carries primary responsibility for operating a venture.
• Frontiers of venturing: The effective limit of conventional approaches to venturing.
• Frontiers of venture investing: Investing in ventures that are on the frontiers.

The frontiers of venturing are the places where conventional venturing and planning approaches become least effective. It is the effective limit of conventional approaches to venturing that define the edge of the frontier with the deepest depths of the frontier being the pre-concept stage of a systemically focused venture.

Conventional approaches loose effectiveness the earlier a venture is in the development phase because of increasing ambiguity.  The less that is known the harder it is to do linear modeling and planning.  Choices made continually reduce ambiguity as the venture moves along the development and into the realm where conventional planning approaches can be effectively used.

On the depth axis, the more systemic the purpose, the greater the complexity. As the system changes, so will the problems and opportunities being addressed as will the community addressing those challenges and opportunities. The interrelatedness of planning decisions and planning context can be an all consuming black-hole. The more you are trying to shake things up, the less you know how things are going to shake out.

While all ventures face a degree of ambiguity, the depth of your foray into the frontiers depends on the depth of complex ambiguity being taken on – a function of complexity and abmiguity.  Conventionally, managing this is accomplished either through blind faith in the entrepreneur and management team or by reducing the complex ambiguity by advancing the planning horizon and responding to situational opportunities and problems. Taking the latter approach often serves to reduce near-term operational risk but also severely limits or eliminates the potential for achieving systemic level impacts, while the former approach is limited by the abilities of the entrepreneur/management team in the unique situation of this specific venture. Neither option suggest even modest probabilities of success particularly at the depths of the frontier… which describes the venturing and venture investing community as it currently operates.

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