BUSINESS RESEARCH

Building A Future–Ready Organisation

Predicting the future is not an easy task, nor is it realistically achievable. And yet leaders have always been eager to see into the future and ask themselves: What are the prospects for future success? What external factors will influence the business in six months, a year, two decades?

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December 2019

In this Hot Topic, we will explore some of the challenges that leaders need to consider to create lasting change in the (near) future. We hope this month’s Hot Topic will inspire you to embrace those challenges and take the future of your business into your own hands.

Renew your human focus to be ready for 2020

At its heart, business is all about the people. Human potential is our number one strength, if we get it right.

Research suggests five key principles to frame a renewed human focus in the workplace: (1) Give organisations a sense of purpose and meaning; (2) Use data, technology and systems in an ethical and fair way; (3) Nurture the personal growth and passion of individuals; (4) Develop teams by focusing on collaboration and personal relationships, moving beyond digital; (5) Share information openly and transparently, managing with a growth mindset.

Test your strategic direction – time to refresh, rewire or recode?

The future of businesses is diverse, hungry, and complex. Reinvention is a daunting and yet inevitable prospect. Whenever leaders are putting a plan into action for next year, it is crucial that they become change agents and are curious about what they can do to create meaningful change.

To become aware and build a deeper understanding of what your organisation needs you to focus on, you can use this model to understand what level and approach would be helpful. (1) Refresh by updating and improving the way things happen now. (2) Rewire by creating new connections and changing the strategic direction. (3) Recode, by starting over and designing from scratch. No matter what path is taken, organisations should strive for a nuanced approach combining human skills with technology.

 

Referenced techniques

Technique

Forecasting

The concept has been created to help practitioners learn how to explore and analyse their firm’s data and understand its forecasting performance. It introduces the fundamentals of forecasting methods and processes, and summarises its strengths, success factors and performance measurements.

Technique

Future Supply Chains

The future supply chain vision encompasses concepts for infrastructure sharing that go beyond common practices. This concept reviews the current state of supply chains and presents a conceptual approach that illustrates how the likelihood of change in the future.

Technique

Human Capital

The view of human resources as a form of capital is not new, but only recently practitioners and academics have turned their attention to the benefits of the efficient employee management. The concept describes these benefits and reviews the success factors and implementation information that will help you improve your HR strategies.

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