Two concepts to achieve world domination for your business.
So smart organisations have begun to consider their return to work plans, while teams are still working from home as we wait for governmental restrictions to be relaxed in the wake of the most serious global health crisis in a century. Smarter organisations have looked deeply at their experiences over the past months and begun to chart and map out how they might evolve their businesses as they return to a new normal. But what are the smartest organisations doing right now? They are turning their collective management minds to two important and related issues – building organisational resilience and building organisation agility.
This organisational skill-set or corporate capability will be a defining attribute for successful organisations post COVID-19 pandemic. It just might be the recipe required to leverage opportunities during the next global catastrophe. What will this be I hear you say. Well there’s no shortage of possibilities, with a major climate change event, act of terrorism, geopolitical uncertainty, the next financial crisis, world war or pandemic topping the charts. All of a sudden, a massive meteor impact or alien invasion don’t look so extreme if added to the list.
Resilience
Organisational resilience is key to developing a fundamental foundation on which to base organisational growth, productivity, and performance.
Resilience delivers an ability to continue to deliver outputs and impact in the face of volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity.
It is the steady organisational rudder during an external environmental storm.
Resilience is a core competency of efficient and effective organisations. It’s not a business continuity plan, a crisis management plan or some good luck. It’s a sum of a range of corporate initiatives designed to allow the business to operate as usual when the environment is anything but usual.
A tsunami of crises can hit an organisation at any time, and principally, can be internally or externally generated. Internal crises can result from events such as insider fraud, financial mismanagement and poorly executed, poorly designed strategies to name a few. Equally, external events such as pandemics, environmental disasters or cyberattacks can devastate unprepared organisations. The results can irrevocably destroy value, operations and reputations.
Building resilience is all about preparation. Plans have a role to play, as does technology, culture, strategy and risk management.
Agility
Organisational agility is key to building on resilience to adapt to changing circumstances quickly, leveraging opportunities and getting in front of the competition to steal market share, deliver innovation solutions to new problems, and deepen, strengthen and widen customer relationships.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, the word ‘pivot’ has emerged as the latest verb for capturing the essence of organisational agility. Whatever you’d like to call it, it’s the opposite of doing the same thing we used to do, in the same old way, for a reason we can’t remember.
Hierarchical corporate structures, paper forms, rigid documented processes full of waste and rework, formality for formality’s sake and an inability to generate new ideas are the basis for agility paralysis.
Loosely-coupled fluid teams, powered by collaborative workspaces, artificial intelligence and robotic process automation, together with a data-driven organisation provide the incubator required for a modern, agile culture to drive performance, innovation and cognitive supremacy to dominate markets and industries.
Scorecard
So how does your organisation rate on the resilience/agility index of strategic capacity for world domination? Or do you send your manager leave applications in triplicate on carbon paper with inked signatures from the comfort of your leather-bound desk in your corporate office on the 45th floor of the CBD – the only place real work can happen while your secretary scratches in this afternoon’s 3 hour team meeting in your paper diary?