Preparing for and Responding to Disruption

Regardless of the nature of your business, you are either already dealing with disruptive forces operating within your industry or are preparing your company for change and disruption. Today’s business environment is different compared to what it was decades ago where everything was predictable and you would operate your business with greater certainty. Things have changed. Businesses across all sectors have to deal with a fast-paced changing environment and the message to current and future business leaders is “Disrupt or be Disrupted”.

Increased regulatory changes, advanced technological developments, a new breed of competitors, increased volatility and uncertainty, among other factors, are all changing the way companies operate and execute their strategies.

Companies that are failing or fail to adapt to this dynamic environment are digging an early grave for themselves. Sooner or later they will join the history books as the once regarded “Too Big To Fail” corporations.

In an era of constant change, uncertainty and increasing complexity, business leaders ought to challenge accepted ways of doing things and reappraise their business models to see if they are still fit for purpose. Unfortunately, many people are reluctant to adapt and change. Fear of the unknown often causes people to resist change, and this at times, results in far-reaching consequences. What used to work, say five or ten years ago, might no longer work in the current environment.

As a result of this fast changing environment, companies have to adapt a highly disruptive approach to managing almost every aspect of their business. As Marshal Goldsmith nicely puts it – What Got You Here Won’t Get You There. This ever-changing environment requires a new style of leadership and thinking. There is need, on the part of companies, to completely abandon legacy ways of thinking and embrace disruptive solutions.

What can companies do to prepare themselves for change and disruption?

Acknowledge That Disruption is Inevitable

Although it is difficult to predict the future with greater certainty and confidence, it is critical for organizations to know and understand that they are operating in an environment that is very unpredictable. Surprises are everywhere and these can abound anytime. To make it worse, we now live and function in a globalized and very interconnected world. Just because you are located in certain jurisdiction does not mean that events in another jurisdiction or industry will not have any major implications on your business.

The forces driving disruption within one industry might not necessarily have a direct impact on your business, but rather, indirectly affect the operations and performance of your business. What cross-industry issues are likely to have an impact on your business now and in the future and at what magnitude?

Instead of focusing on the past alone, management and their teams should start looking at the future and anticipate those forces capable of transforming the company’s existence and its operating model. In other words, having sharp risk-sensing tools capable of identifying risks and opportunities. This includes asking tougher questions about issues affecting the future of the organization, and having the right capabilities to respond accordingly.

You must be able to quickly identify any sudden shifts in the business environment that are capable of rendering your company’s broader strategy less relevant than it was in the past. In today’s era of data and analytics, companies can take advantage of these new technologies and use them to help predict the future and make fact-based and confident decisions. The challenge for many companies is having that ability to rise above all the noise out there and obtain the right insights for effective future decision making.

Take social media technology as an example. It has changed and continues to change the relationship between brands and customers. Control of brands has shifted to consumers. Consumers are constantly talking to each other on various social media platforms about different brands – the good, the bad and the ugly. It is no longer a case of the marketing team pushing the company’s products and services to the consumers, but rather listening to them.

Unfortunately, many companies are still reliant on internal sources of data to make key strategic decisions. They have not yet embraced new systems to mine unstructured external sources of data and tap into consumer conversations to hear what is being discussed about their products and services. Companies need to be reminded that managing in this environment requires them to adapt to this transition, get a grip on social media and start holding profitable conversations with consumers.

Given the massive proliferation of data, focusing on the right information is therefore a must.

Challenge Current Strategic Thinking

It is one thing acknowledging that forces of disruption are inevitable, and another thing to challenge current strategic thinking. What do you do when you have identified the various forces threatening to disrupt your business? Do you sit down, relax and allow nature to take its course?

Unfortunately, in today’s hyper-competitive and complex business environment, once an organization has identified potential disruption forces, it is critical to review the organization’s strategic choices and find ways of responding to the threats or opportunities presented on the table. This might require you to review your market and product portfolios and select the best candidates for investment. Some of the questions that you might ask yourself are:

Given the finite resources at our disposal, what are the strategic choices that we should focus on and invest in?
Which markets, customers and segments should we invest in now to position ourselves for the future?
Who are our important stakeholders and how do we plan to satisfy their multiple sets of demands?
How best can we realign our value chain in order to optimize our business performance and competitive advantage?

For many companies, their market share is under pressure from intense competition by current and new competitors. In order to survive and not disappear into the thin air, these companies must adapt and transform their business models. Strategies that might have worked for them in the past are now deemed unreliable. As a result, these companies have to respond faster and differently compared to their competition.

What is key is getting everyone within the company on the same journey. For people at the bottom to shed legacy ways of thinking, the tone of message from the top must be right. Leaders have the duty to provide a clear framework and steps required to move the organization from one position to the next. They must clearly communicate the plan to everyone, from top to bottom, and ensure the response plan is aligned with the overall company strategy and easily understood organization-wide.

When there is full buy-in and accountability from the top, there is a higher probability of buy-in from the lower level employees. A command-and-control approach cannot keep pace with a dynamic business environment.

Execute the Plan More Effectively

Various research findings have concluded that most companies, irrespective of industry, are good at planning but poor at effectively executing these plans. A lot of work and resources goes into these planning processes, unfortunately, these yield unsatisfactory results.

The difference between success and failure frequently comes down to how the organization implements its strategic plan. So often, there is a misalignment between strategy and implementation, resulting in poor performance. Preparing and responding to disruption requires business leaders to craft a simple to understand, but effective strategy, that is communicated consistently across the organization.

Clear communication of strategy throughout the company is key to creating alignment. Additionally, clear communication helps establish common goals for the different business unit managers to work collectively toward. On the contrary, poor communication creates barriers to effective execution. Getting everyone to work towards the same objectives improves cohesion.

In order to make sure that you are moving in the right direction, you must design and implement KPIs that measure progress towards achieving strategic goals. This helps set expectations and help identify any problems regarding execution.

Executing the plan effectively also demands the organization to have the right talent in place to implement the strategic choices that have been made. In most cases, lack of talent in key strategic positions has been proved to inhibit business growth. It is therefore imperative for leaders to know and understand that the capabilities required for success today are quite different from those that were needed in the past.

For example, the finance function of the past had chartered accountants as the team members. Today, the function has people with diverse backgrounds. This is because, as the role of the finance function evolves from being a bean counter to a bean grower, managing the function requires very different capabilities.

The onus is therefore on the company to develop and implement an effective talent sourcing strategy that attracts and optimizes talent and resources, and ultimately improve business performance.

Now or later, every business will experience some form of disruption. Business leaders must understand that disruptions will happen, and with each disruption comes risk and opportunity.

Are you prepared for the change and ready to respond?

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The Art of Risk Management

This is the title of the article by BCG published a few years ago. The article discusses the principles that should govern the approach to risk management by companies of all shapes and sizes.

The authors make several points with which I agree. Here are some excerpts:

Risk management is essential in today’s volatile economy. In a continuously changing economic environment, companies cannot assume a stable risk landscape.
Stop thinking of risk management as primarily a regulatory issue. Embed risk management in the mindset of the broader organization.
Risk management is a value-creating activity that is an essential part of the strategic conversation inside the company. The goal of that discussion should not be to eliminate or minimize risk but to use it to create a competitive advantage.
Risk management starts at the top. The organization needs to demonstrate that it has made risk management a high priority and an integral part of the decision-making process by appointing a dedicated risk leader who reports back frequently to the CEO and the board to discuss the latest trends and any changes in the company’s risk scenarios.
Risk cannot be managed from an ivory tower. Risk Management should not exist in isolation from the rest of the organization, with an insufficiently granular understanding of the actual business-specific risks the company faces. To avoid this outcome, integrate risk management into the company’s entire routine management processes, including planning, capital allocation, controlling, and reporting.
- Understand the scope of the risks the company faces.
- Plan for how the company will manage those risks.
- Act to mitigate the risks or take advantage of strategic opportunities.
Avoid relying on black boxes. Although sometimes appropriate, over-reliance on complex metrics or models can muddy the risk management process, turning it from a transparent management activity into a frustrating black box. The appropriate level of complexity is company-specific and depends on the industry, business model, availability of data, level of experience, and mandatory legal requirements.
Align risk management with a company’s overall business strategy. Companies need to identify all relevant risks – not just those that can be easily quantified. Some of the relevant risks for a company may be those that are qualitative and especially difficult to quantify.
Risk management is more than a policy; it is a culture. The objective of a company’s risk-management system should be not only to enforce new policies but also to create a risk-aware culture that addresses risks proactively, not reactively, and manages them to create new sources of competitive advantage.
Effective risk management depends on the free flow of information throughout the organization. Unless employees at all levels of the organization are actively involved in the risk management process, it will be difficult to maintain the unrestricted flow of information. This can result in the most important data getting buried in one part of the organization unavailable to other parts of the business.
Risk management deals with uncertain futures. As a result, the goal should not be to develop precise metrics or future outcomes but to strive for a general understanding of the probabilities and potential impact of various trends or scenarios on business performance and enable decision-makers to confront the uncertain nature of risk and act accordingly.
Risk management is never about finding “the answer.” Rather, it is about continually refining the organization’s assumptions about the future and its understanding of the implications of those assumptions for the company’s business. Assumptions about risk often change quickly, so the relevant parameters, probabilities, impacts, and correlations should be revisited frequently.
It is possible to prepare for unknown risks by building an organization that so excels at crisis management that it is resilient even in situations in which it is blindsided by unprecedented challenges. For example, through developing the ability to detect, capture, and exploit information patterns as well as to think outside existing frameworks and risk landscapes.
Avoid the downside, but don’t forget the upside. Companies should use risk management also to identify new opportunities and to exploit them systematically. For example, scenario planning should be used to define not only worst-case scenarios but also best-case scenarios. Think in advance about how a company can make the best use of the latest market developments and trends and ultimately make the right decisions.

I enjoyed reading the article and highly recommend it.

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Leading in Uncertain Times

One of the biggest challenges facing business leaders today is making the right decisions that will ensure their organizations succeed, survive, and remain competitive in an increasingly uncertain and complex environment.

A recent post, The best way to lead in uncertain times may be to throw out the playbook, by Strategy+Business has several good points.

The article is about the COVID-19 pandemic, how global companies navigated through the crisis, and how best to prepare for future disruptions. Here are some key points and my comments.

Rather than follow a rigid blueprint, executives must help organizations focus on sensing and responding to unpredictable market conditions.
- Comment: Senior leaders play a vital role in providing clarity about the organization’s strategic direction, creating alignment on key priorities to ensure the achievement of enterprise objectives, and ensuring the business model is continuously evolving to create and capture value in the face of uncertainty. They must not rest on their laurels and stick to the beliefs and paradigms that got them to where they are today and hope they will carry them through tomorrow. Regulatory changes, new products, competition, markets, technologies, and shifts in customer behavior are upending many outdated assumptions about business success. Thus, the businesses you have today are different from the ones you will need in the future hence the importance of continuously sensing changes in the global economy. Employees and teams often feed off the energy of their leaders and tend to focus their attention where the leader focuses attention. If the leader is comfortable with current business practices and rarely embraces the future or challenges the status quo, then the team is highly likely to follow suit.
When it became clear that supply chains and other operations would fracture, organizations began scenario planning to shift production sources, relocate employees, and secure key supplies.
- Comment: Instead of using scenario planning to anticipate the future and prepare for different outcomes, it seems most of the surveyed organizations used scenario planning as a reactionary tool. Don’t wait for a crisis or a shift in the market to start thinking about the future. The world is always changing. As I wrote in The Resilient Organization, acknowledge that the future is a range of possible outcomes, learn and develop capabilities to map out multiple future scenarios, develop an optimal strategy for each of those scenarios, then continually test the effectiveness of these strategies. This does not necessarily mean that every change in the market will impact your business. Identify early warnings of what might be important and pay closer attention to those signals. In other words, learn to separate the signals from the noise.
The pandemic forced the organization’s senior management team to re-examine how all decisions were made.
- Comment: Bureaucracy has for a very long time stood in the way of innovation and agility. To remain innovative and adapt quickly in a fast-changing world, the organization must have nimble leadership and an empowered workforce where employees at all levels can dream up new ideas and bring them to life. Identifying and acting on emerging threats and potential opportunities is not the job of the leader alone but every team member. To quote Rita McGrath, in her book Seeing Around Corners, she writes, “Being able to detect weak signals that things are changing requires more eyes and ears throughout the organization. The critical information that informs decision-making is often locked in individual brains.” In addition to the internal environment, the leader must also connect with the external environment (customers, competitors, regulators, and other stakeholders), looking for what is changing and how.
It’s worthwhile for leaders of any team to absorb the lessons of sense-respond-adapt, even if there is no emergency at hand.
Sensing: Treat the far-flung parts of your enterprise as listening stations. The question leaders must ask is, “What are we learning from our interactions beyond the usual information about costs and sales?” Train your people to listen for potentially significant anomalies and ensure that important information is not trapped in organizational silos.
- Comment: Cost and sales data are lagging indicators that reveal the consequences or outcomes of past activities and decisions. Although this information can help leaders spot trends by looking at patterns over time, it doesn’t help understand the future and inform what needs to be done for the numbers to tell a different story. In addition to lagging indicators, pay attention to current and leading indicators and understand the relationship between these indicators and outcomes.
Responding: Improve communication across intra- and inter-organizational boundaries. Leaders should view business continuity as an essential function that acts as connective tissue for the enterprise.
- Comment: In addition to creating mechanisms that allow the free flow of information both inside and outside the organization, decision-makers should also be comfortable receiving information that challenges their personal view of the world, even if it’s not what they want to hear. Create a culture of psychological safety where people are not afraid to share bad news for fear of getting punished, but rather are acknowledged and rewarded for speaking up. Leveraging the diversity of thought enables leaders to anticipate the future as an organization, decide what to do about it collectively, and then mobilize the organization to do what’s necessary.
Adapting: Challenge assumptions, and question orthodoxies. There’s always the temptation to mitigate threats simply by applying existing practices harder and faster. One way to get at those deeper issues and encourage double-loop learning is to ask, “What needs to be true for this to be the right approach?”
- Comment: In an increasingly uncertain environment, it’s difficult to survive and thrive with an old business model or outdated technologies. Many businesses fail because they continue doing the same thing for too long, and they don’t respond quickly enough and effectively when conditions change. As a leader, stay curious and connected to the external environment, look for market shifts, understand what needs to be regularly refreshed and reimagined, adopt new technologies and capabilities, and adapt in ordinary times but also during times of transition. Unfortunately for many leaders, it’s just more convenient for them to continually downplay the fact that conditions are changing than take the appropriate course of action that drives business success.

How are you preparing your organization for potential future disruptions?

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The Collaborative Organization

These days the term collaboration has become synonymous with organizational culture, creativity, innovation, increased productivity, and success.

Let’s look at the COVID-19 pandemic as an example. At the peak of the crisis, several companies instructed their workers to adopt remote working as a health and safety precautionary measure.

Two years into the pandemic, they are now asking their employees back to the office full time or are planning to adopt a hybrid model.

The need to preserve our collaborative culture and accelerate innovation are two of the top benefits being cited by organizational and team leaders for bringing workers back.

Collaboration is indeed essential for the achievement of team goals, functional objectives, and the overall success of the organization.

Today’s breakthrough innovations are emerging from many interacting teams and collaborative relationships.

When teams, functions, and organizations collaborate, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts; group genius emerges, and creativity unfolds.

But, what makes a successful collaboration? What are the key enabling conditions?

It extends beyond the boundaries of the organization. Business success is a function of internal and external relationships. Instead of viewing your business in vacuo, understand that you are part of an ecosystem. External to your organization, who do you need to partner with to enhance your value creation processes, achieve/exceed your objectives, or successfully execute your strategy?
Ensure the objectives are clear and there is shared understanding by everyone. Unclear objectives are one of the topmost barriers to team and organizational performance.
Foster a culture that encourages opinions and ideas that challenge the consensus. People should feel free to share their ideas and not hold back for fear of others penalizing them or thinking less of them. Collaboration is hindered when one or two people dominate the discussion, are arrogant, or don’t think they can learn anything from others.
Groups perform more effective under certain circumstances, and less effective under others. There is a tendency to fixate on certain topics of discussion amongst groups which often leaves members distracted from their ideas. To reduce the negative effects of topic fixation, members of the group should be given periods to work alone and switch constantly between individual activity and group interaction.
Effective collaboration can happen if the people involved come from diverse backgrounds and possess complementary skills to prevent conformity. The best collective decisions or creative ideas are often a product of different bodies of knowledge, multiple opinions, disagreement, and divergent thought processes, not consensus or compromise.
New technologies are making collaboration easier than ever, enabling us to increase our reach and broaden our network. Although new technology helps, it will not make your organization collaborative without the right culture and values in place. First, define what you want to achieve through collaboration then use these tools to promote creative collaboration.

How else are you championing collaboration within your organization to create value and succeed?

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Preparing for and Responding to Disruption

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