Reimagine the Future: From Surviving to Thriving

We are operating in a radically altered business and economic environment from where we were just a few months ago. There is no doubt that COVID-19 is a global health crisis of landscape scale proportion. The pandemic has affected societies and economies around the globe and will permanently reshape our world as it continues to unfold. However, it’s the second and third order effects that have and will forever change the world and how we conduct business hereafter. We are already witnessing record levels of unemployment, severe cutbacks in economic investment, and significant changes to how business is being done. 

Today, for some organizations, near-term survival is the only agenda item. Others are peering through the fog of uncertainty, thinking about how to position themselves once the crisis has passed and things return to normal. This raises the obvious two-prong question; when will normality return and what will the “new” normal look like? However, organizations should avoid the temptation to solely and thoughtlessly address this “obvious” question. 

The Five Second Challenge

As Albert Einstein stated, “In the midst of every crisis, lies great opportunity.” Before an organization plans its return “back to normal”, an idiom commonly used during a crisis, leaders need to hit the pause button — but only for five seconds — and ask themselves this critical question: Should our organization go back to normal; now that we have seen the future of doing business differently? For some organizations, the answer may be “no”. For those organizations, they need to Reimagine the Future and Redefine Success.   

Flexing Leadership Muscles: From Surviving to Thriving

Today, we are faced with uncertainty and ambiguity. It’s imperative to have agility to find a new cadence for problem-solving. Strong leaders get ahead of changing circumstances to build a Resilient Organization. Below is a simple but very effective paradigm (a Blueprint for Transformation) that will allow an organization to exercise its fast-twitch and slow-twitch leadership muscles to Reimagine the Future and Redefine Success.

Anticipate. Visionary leaders who “think big” ― “anticipate” the full range of possibilities of the future. They identify the long-term transformative trends that will impact their organization. These could include significant industry change, business model disruption, the emergence of new competitors, product or service transformation. Essentially, one needs to develop a “point of view” and get grounded in the “big changes” that will impact their organization over a five- or ten-year period, perhaps even longer. Brainstorm with others to consider how to shift old mental models to new ones and deliberately challenge long-standing assumptions and conventional wisdom in your team or organization by asking the team to list the operating assumptions that must change.

They need to consider, for example, how large disruptive forces, like technology, deregulation and globalization, will change customer preferences, enable new markets and upend business dynamics. They need to have humility and foresight to explore doomsday scenarios, including how new developments might drive them out of business. Successful innovators are willing to start from a clean sheet of paper to pursue ideas that have the potential to rewrite the rules of a product line, a company or even entire industries.

Analyze. Effective innovative leaders “start small” after “thinking big.” Rather than jump on the bandwagon for one potentially big product or idea, they break the concept down into smaller pieces to “analyze” and to test. They run small experiments rather than big bets to rapidly experiment novel approaches and continuously iterate in real time.

They take a radical approach and risks when necessary, always questioning traditional assumptions in pursuit of the best idea. They don’t allow themselves to make decisions solely on intuition or allow themselves to lock in on financial projections based on wishful thinking. They defer important decisions until they have real, empirical data. Great leaders are transparent and humble about what they know and don’t know and seek the unvarnished truth.

Act.  After “thinking big” and “starting small”, effective leaders “move fast”. They value speed over perfectionism and take the attitude that a demo is worth more than thousands of pages of business plans. In short, they “act”. They conduct extensive, inexpensive prototyping before they even get to the pilot phase—let alone the big rollout—so they can gather comprehensive information and quickly analyze both what’s working and what isn’t.

Adapt.  After “thinking big”, “starting small” and “moving fast”, innovative leaders “learn quickly” by maintaining agility and take a scientific approach to innovation. They are nimble and they “adapt”. The successes develop the institutional discipline and muscle to keep on asking the tough questions and are ready to set aside or alter projects based on what they learn, not what they hope. They model real-time learning and commit to a culture of rapid-cycle discovery. During the learning phase, effective leaders conduct “postmortem” reviews to determine the lessons from successes and failures and constantly ask the team, “What can we learn from this?”. Effective leaders course-correct based on disconfirming evidence, even after a decision or announcement has been made, they will alter the plan instead of pretending it did not happen.

To build a resilient organization, effective leaders must listen, support, and be empathic while being bold, decisive, and action oriented.

Dr. Shane Goodwin is the Associate Dean of Graduate Programs and Executive Education and serves as a Professor of Practice in the Department of Finance at The Cox School of Business at Southern Methodist University. Dr. Goodwin is a Board Leadership Fellow at the National Association of Corporate Directors. Additionally, Dr. Goodwin leads The Applied Corporate Governance Institute at The Center for Global Enterprise, an organization that advises companies to understand, engage, and succeed with their investors in complex and contested shareholder matters. Dr. Goodwin serves as an expert witness on complex litigation issues regarding M&A, corporate governance, capital markets and corporate finance matters and serves on several corporate and not-for-profit boards.