The only thing constant is change

The outside forces that got you here aren't going to be the ones you contend with to get to your next goal

In the situation we find ourselves in today, with uncertainty about COVID still looming and new information shifting our world daily, outside forces are impacting your business and changing the behaviors and needs of your customers, whether or not you are aware of them. Business leaders today must understand what those outside forces are, how they are changing, and how that affects the customer.

Customer behaviors changed on a dime when the world went into lockdown. They changed quickly when the world started to reopen as people were vaccinated and are changing again now as we figure out new hybrid models and how the Delta variant will play out. Whether your business benefited from conditions of the last year or suffered from them, right now you've got to read the playing field, understand what your customer's new needs are, and pivot once again to meet them.?

You can't go back. You can only go forward.

To understand outside forces impacting your business, you must:

1. Listen to your customers: Talk directly with them and understand what their new needs are. How have their needs changed since you last heard from them? What new outside forces are acting on?them??What are they trying to do about it?
2. Understand the new enablers: You don’t want to use the same old technologies to solve your customer’s new problems. New enablers are coming to the forefront all the time, and they are key to addressing your customers’ needs better than before. What new technologies and processes can enable you to do a better job serving your customers in their new needs?
3. Recognize your proprietary gifts:?Your enterprise has capabilities that no other organizations have that give it an advantage in solving your customer’s new needs. What are they?
4. Hypothesize new solutions:?Understanding your customer’s new needs, the new enablers, and your own proprietary gifts to create new solutions to the new needs.
5. Rapidly test and iterate:?Quickly test these solution hypotheses as prototypes and proofs-of-concept to get to product/market fit. Then and only then, scale your solution to meet your customer’s new needs.

And not only do you have to do all of this - you have to do it better and faster than your competitors.?

The world we find ourselves in is increasingly a world of black swan events. In a world like this, we should think in terms of the new metrics of resilience, where instead of just asking yourself "what is our market share?" you also ask, "what is our share of our customer's needs?" And most importantly, “what is our share of our customer's?new?needs?”?

Those are the questions to be asking as COVID continues to keep us in a world of uncertainty. And they're the questions to keep asking yourself over and over in the emerging business landscape. As we move toward the complex and increasingly interconnected world of the future, the businesses that ask and answer these questions correctly will not only win the day, but create the future as well.

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