Battle ready!

This VUCA/BANI (take your pick)?world where disruption is perhaps the only continuing certainty has made leaders (and some of us aspiring to leadership) to adopt/see/recognise the act/continuing process of thought of ‘resilience’ as a basic, primary mandate for putting together and managing a sustainable business, any business.

But how do we define ‘resilience’? More importantly, how do we see ‘resilience’? As strategy? As tactics? As a process of thought? A little bit of everything? And also, where do want this resilience? In the everyday workplace of technology, the building/developing of an organisation? In our people? In our marketing team? Our R&D division? HR?

For the vast majority of us I do not think these answers have come through – and we haven’t even sought them. We are far too dependent/comfortable/sanguine upon how the world unfolds around us, and each time we have a little jolt or a bump, we manage to ‘adjust’. Entrepreneurs among us have perhaps had a glimmer of what resilience could mean to/for them… but then I suspect that they’ve been there for quite some time. I see entrepreneurs being continually subject to change and the greater majority of them manage to handle this disruption with aplomb – and prosper, too!

I firmly believe that a lot of knee-jerk reactions from leaders of all sorts come from reading what the so-called pundits predict – or from little thunderclouds on the horizon. True leaders are those who take the view of putting together and nurturing forests… and not with the symbolic act of planting saplings. My advice to leaders? Stop being buried by immediate problems or be vulnerable to every other crisis that comes along.

Resilience requires the need for far-sighted growth and goals. It is an exercise that must be a joint effort across the entire ecosystem that they oversee. Create an agenda for yourself, put down an action plan, create, collaborate, or compensate for the brain and the brawn required, and then power your way to growth. In the future, failure – both qualitatively and quantitatively – will become progressively costlier.

Don’t let this be your future.