Given all the unknowns, organisations must lay the groundwork for their recoveries now, and rethink the way they operate. The current crisis offers the unique opportunity of spurring inner leadership, and building strength and resilience.
In this Hot Topic, we will explore how leaders can own the narrative and bounce forward to prepare for the future of their organisations.
Three dance moves that will define success for your organisation
Where do organisations restart? How do they bring workers back to work? Urgent as they are, these questions should not be your starting point. Today, leaders must instead focus on mastering three key ‘moves’ as they prepare for the ‘dance’ – the long period of transition which will follow full lockdown:
1. Prediction: How to anticipate future scenarios
2. Adaptability: How to respond better and faster to changes
3. Resilience: How to withstand unforeseen shocks and mistakes
Enterprise resilience, prediction and a strong adaptability are the key elements that will define success for your organisation in the post-crisis era. Leaders have to learn how to best allocate resources across these three priorities in order to successfully lead their organisation during the long dance.
What’s next? Looking beyond the horizon
By developing a clear vision for the post-crisis future, leaders will be able to thrive in the novel business environment of the ‘new normal’ – which may be very different from what it was before the crisis began.
So, how can you use this global critical moment to get ready and reinvent your operations?
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Three priorities
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What to do?
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How?
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Prediction
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It is impossible to anticipate the future with perfect certainty, but you can prepare alternative scenarios and develop clarity about what your company could and should become. |
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1. Dedicate time to explore and envision your future on a weekly basis. Ask yourself: where do you want your organisation to be when the crisis passes? What is likely to change about your customers and markets, and what is not?
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2. Collect information from diverse audiences including frontline employees and customers.
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3. Make sure to measure, monitor, and formally review your progress.
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Adaptability
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Speed and agility are key: you must avoid a snapback to old ways of working, you must innovate and learn quickly, and you must continuously revisit your vision.
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1. Keep the high pace of experimentation and reinforce learning by investing in employees’ skills and encourage knowledge transfer.
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2. Discover and build new businesses that customers want now. Promote people who excel at identifying and scaling innovative opportunities and promote ideas from local teams.
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Resilience
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Being resilient does not only refer to the ability to bounce back from adversity; it also means being able to avoid costly scenarios and build buffer capacity.
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1. Consider threats as well as opportunities to accelerate new growth offerings.
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2. Observe, reflect, and learn from the crisis, to apply those lessons to a future experience.
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3. Understand the acceptable costs: choose the buffer capacity for investments and ensure that inevitable mistakes don’t damage the organisation.
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Action Point
Evaluate the extent to which your organisation has embedded each building block – prediction, adaptability and resilience – into its vision. On what priority should you focus next and why?