How to thrive in a world of business transformation

There’s no shortage of advice on how to manage change, deliver transformation and build business resilience. But change isn’t just a programme that runs and then finishes – it is now a core capability for a successful business, especially at enterprise level. 

To some, resilience means maintaining business continuity in turbulent times. But while rolling with the punches is vital, true resilience must extend to executing on growth opportunities when they arise. Thriving, not just surviving, is the goal - but it has never been harder to achieve.

That’s because change itself is changing. Not just evolving, but accelerating simultaneously on multiple fronts: political, technological, environmental and fiscal domains moving at pace in new and unpredictable ways.

In an era where nothing stays the same, how can a business anticipate and transform successfully, capitalising on opportunities and avoiding pitfalls while continuing to advance towards its long-term ambitions?

Many organisations take comfort in identifying a point in the future and using it to set their course. But this ‘strategic North Star’ approach involves huge risk. Your prediction may be wrong, and worse, your organisation may fixate on it to the extent it is unable, or unwilling, to see its flaws, making it harder to adapt to the unexpected. Holding on to a strategy – no matter how arduously reached - doesn’t make sense when the landscape is changing all around you. 

Focusing on a single strategy to the exclusion of other alternatives can lead to costly mis-steps that destabilise the business as well as the budget. For example, many energy companies very publicly changed course to diversify away from hydrocarbons to a very strong focus on clean energy, investing billions in the process. As society’s and investors sentiment towards electric vehicles and sustainable energy sources decelerated, those investments began to look significantly less attractive. As a result, many were forced to re-invest and commit to more reliable and traditional sources of acceptable returns.

Getting the timing right is hard, but it is considerably easier to nudge forwards if you have planned for the uncertainty. This requires a more open-minded and flexible approach - one where you adjust continually to what happens around you. Like a traveller in a desert, you need to be able to refine your course regularly to match the new dunes and valleys created by every sandstorm.

Instead of predicting one scenario outcome and going all-out for it, leaders can imagine many futures and use them to help build business resilience.

The scope of these futures is usually a sliding scale between two extremes. For example, a defence manufacturer in today’s environment may choose a range of outcomes between a full multi-nation war fighting scenario and one where the national government decides to stop investing in sovereign capability and relies on supply chains from alliance nations. Leadership must consider the extremes to avoid the upside and downside opportunities – looking left and right of the current strategic path forward.

With its waypoints mapped, a business can assess its readiness for each scenario and begin to build resilience where there are gaps in its strategy. This involves addressing a huge range of open questions: Who will your customers be? What technologies will you need? How does the supply chain need to change? Do your people have the right skills? Could your existing structure and processes deliver the changes required?

Of course, imaginary futures are boundless, and leadership must maintain clarity about the organisation’s core remit in order to limit the possibilities in the frame.

Again, this is not about correctly predicting the future, but about maintaining awareness on multiple fronts and picking up signals about which way things are heading.

So what does it take to transform and lead change? Our clients that have implemented successful transformation programmes tell us it comes down to the same five key things:

1. Keep change strategy-led - Develop, use and engage with the multiple scenarios you’ve developed. Use them to create excitement and clarity. They can provide guide-rails for prioritising decisions and keeping teams focused and engaged.
2. Set challenging and inspiring targets - Shake the organisation out of its status quo with launch targets that are bold and inspiring. Make it clear how a new approach will deliver sustainability and headroom for growth.
3. Prioritise the ‘how’ over the ‘what’ - Remember you are continuously building your change muscles, not delivering a series of changes with start and end points. Success depends more on the journey, than the technical solution.
4. Focus on the human - Change happens on the human level, which means your measures of success are not just data and KPIs, but individual engagement, enthusiasm and sense of purpose. Executives should focus 70% of their time on the human journey.
5. Lead well - Leadership is the number one determinant of change success, and leading change can be hard. Aligning leaders in a continuous and perfect alignment may not be a realistic goal. Humility, curiosity and openness to feedback are the winning leadership skills that are least well understood and practised. 

Each of these pillars is itself a complex and multi-layered challenge. We’ll be exploring each of them in more depth in future articles.

To understand more about how we can help you, please contact our Enterprise Transformation team.