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.
This Hot Topic explores how leaders can shift from reactive survival to proactive transformation - owning the narrative, fostering agility, and preparing for a future marked by complexity and opportunity.
Three dance moves that will define success for your organisation
Rather than defaulting to short-term fixes, forward-thinking leaders must develop the strategic capacity to dance with change. This means mastering three interlinked capabilities:
1. Prediction – Anticipating Future Scenarios:
Organisational foresight enables better planning in volatile environments. Leaders must engage in continuous environmental scanning, scenario planning, and strategic forecasting. Research by Schoemaker et al. (2018) shows that organisations that invest in foresight capabilities outperform peers in market valuation and revenue growth.
2. Adaptability – Responding Better and Faster:
Adaptability is not simply flexibility; it is the organisational capacity to change direction with purpose. Research highlights that firms with adaptive cultures are more likely to survive and thrive during periods of instability (Denison et al., 2004). Adaptive organisations decentralise decision-making, encourage experimentation, and reward learning.
3. Resilience – Withstanding Shocks and Mistakes:
Enterprise resilience is more than just bouncing back; it is about bouncing forward with improved capacity. Lengnick-Hall et al. (2011) define resilience as the ability to absorb strain, recover from failure, and learn from disruption. Resilient organisations align their structures, values, and people practices to foster psychological safety, redundancy in systems, and emotional strength.
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
Rather than returning to old paradigms, leaders now have the chance to rethink how their organisations operate, innovate, and grow. According to Duchek (2020), the most resilient organisations treat change as a catalyst for transformation. They focus on future readiness, continuous learning, and cultivating employee engagement through trust and purpose.
By adopting an anticipatory, adaptive, and resilient mindset, leaders can create organisations that are better prepared not only to survive uncertainty—but to emerge stronger, more agile, and more aligned with the future.
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?