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The idea › From twin to digital corporation
From a physical company to a digital corporation.
A working map of the journey: first you build a twin of the organisation, then take its work apart, then put it back together, until the organisation runs through its capabilities. Working names: DGTWN for the twin, DGCRP for the digital corporation it can become.
The short answer
We think organisations will move through stages: from work held in people’s heads, to a digital twin built from their own systems, to work described as capabilities and reassigned between people, software and AI, and finally to a digital corporation where people keep the intent, the authority and the accountability. This is a hypothesis we’re developing in public; section 9 of the flagship paper sets it out in full.
The journey, stage by stage
- 0
Physical
Work lives in people’s heads, on paper and in habit. It works, until someone leaves.
- 1
Digitised
Work leaves traces in systems: email, files, finance, customer records. The information exists, scattered.
- 2
DGTWN: the twin
A working model of the organisation built from its own systems and checked by a person: who can reach what, what runs on what, what feeds into what.
Where Stratapault works today ↗ - 3
Analyse
See the work: where it flows, where it waits, what it costs and what could go wrong, one question at a time.
- 4
Extract
Describe each piece of work as a capability: its input, its transformation and its output, on an Element card with a record of evidence.
The Periodic Table of Work explores this → - 5
Reassign
Decide who or what does each capability: a person, software, AI or a mix. Delegate the doing, keep the deciding.
- 6
Recompose
Put the capabilities back together. Some run inside; some are bought by their output from outside.
- 7
DGCRP: the digital corporation
Most capabilities run digitally and are managed through the twin. The twin stops being a copy and becomes how the organisation runs. People hold the intent, the authority and the accountability.
What we’re still working out
- Is it a ladder or a map? One function, say finance, could reach stage 7 while the rest stays at 2.
- What proves you’ve moved up? A measure for each stage, not a feeling.
- The human floor: what can never be handed over, and what the law requires of people, such as directors.
- Going back: what happens when a stage fails and a person takes the work back.
- Who benefits: what happens to jobs, apprenticeships and know-how nobody wrote down.
How this could fail
- Coordination costs may grow faster than the savings as work is split up.
- Some work resists description: judgement, relationships, taste.
- The destination may not be desirable, even where it’s possible.
Who got here first
Others have mapped parts of this. The Digital Twin Consortium’s Business Maturity Model (2024) describes stages of adopting digital twins; the “digital twin of an organisation” is an established idea; Work Without Jobs (Jesuthasan and Boudreau, 2022) argues for taking jobs apart into tasks; Ronald Coase (1937) and Oliver Williamson (Nobel lecture, 2009) explain why some work is done inside a firm and some is bought; and our Element card follows Datasheets for Datasets (Gebru and others) and Model Cards (Mitchell and others). Each stage on its own is covered somewhere. Our claim is narrow: we found no public source that joins a twin, a capability card and a buyable capability into one path, but that is “not found in our search”, not “first”. What we’re testing is whether the whole journey is a useful way to plan. The library lists what we build on.
Help shape it. This is the earliest version of the model. If you research or run organisations, challenge it or add to it, or email us.