Politicians may be giving you the impression that there is something like a free lunch. The reality is that the success or otherwise of your business will depend on the ability of your business to quickly adapt to the many changes the future (near future) will bring with it. As we have seen during the pandemic, this readiness for change is a pivotal source of resilience. Such readiness for change reflects how businesses can adapt, the robustness of their internal capabilities & structures and how capable they are of finding new sources of growth. So my message to you is to fasten your seat belt and make sure that your companies are ready to change and adapt at breakneck speed.

Below are some insights, that expand on what I mean by all this.

Never stop exploring
Opportunities to learn are fleeting. However, always keep in mind that once your competitors explore enough, they will pivot and change to exploit that new knowledge base to their advantage. So, at all times, you must maintain a healthy portion of activities dedicated to exploring the new, even when early evidence remains unclear, and commit yourself to difficult choices and tough tradeoffs guided by a vision about the future when evidence becomes compelling.

Digitalisation is more than skin deep
As we all know, the pandemic has pushed digitalisation in businesses at a very fast pace. This has raised even further the expectations of consumers. Consumers today want to added values services like personalising their goods online, a wider range of choice and having them delivered very quickly. To make this happen, and to do it profitably, a company must digitalise its entire operations. It must automate all the tracking and coordination with external partners. All this requirea new learning.

Learn Aggressively to create a Vision
In a period of heightened change, there are big decisions that need to be taken that would commit your business towards certain strategic directions. To be able to do this correctly you need to rest on a high learning attitude and a top management team aligned with the generated vision of the future.

Change your Decision Methods & Thinking
Knowing how to make decisions quickly is essential to surviving in a period of heightened change. To do so, you need to identify which decisions are reversible and which are not. Reversible decisions are those from which you can back out later if you don’t like what you see, so you can go fast on them. What I see however, is that as an organisation grows bigger, managers tend to uniformly use a heavy-handed approach to scrutinise every decision and slow down the company.Having a clear distinction on what type of decision you’re making is key when change is constant. To put it simple, this is about striking a good balance between a healthy paranoia of what could go wrong that guides decision making but still not stopping the company from trying new things.

The bottom line is simple – the threat of a business losing relevance looms even larger. That’s why becoming future ready and adapting to change is so important. However it takes courage to drive change, but drive it you must – so fasten your seat belt and drive to a new future.