The Three Big Problems Organizations Need to Solve in the 21st Century

Right about now, our organizations are working...in all the wrong ways. They're solving yesterday's problems, mostly, still. But those problems have already been solved. Yet today's and tomorrow's haven't. They're just getting bigger, spinning out of control, and so the future's unravelling—or what's left of it.

What do I mean by that? Here are the three problems our creaking old Industrial Age organizations were built to solve, and did solve.

Profit. We know how to build organizations to maximize profits. Profits hit record-shattering levels, and then earth-shattering ones. That doesn't mean that every organization is profitable, but it does mean that maximizing profits is very much a solved problem. Efficiency, scale, reach, make it all look glamorous, perhaps. We know how to solve this problem—to death.

Scale. We know how to build organizations at massive, and I mean massive scales. Think about how big some of the world's biggest really are. They employ millions of people, and informally employ even more than that, as contractors and temps and so forth. We have incredibly complex systems of management for all this, from "matrix management," to the sheer grunt work of modern day "Human Resources," to the way poor old job-seekers have to send out billions of CVs just to get maybe a handful of interviews. The scale at which we work is colossal. Solved problem.

Reach. We know how to build organizations that can reach...right across the globe. Impress their brands and marketing and messages upon not just millions but even billions of minds. That's not even particularly complicated anymore—though it can take work. We have, again, incredibly complex systems to manage and manipulate this. Reach means finance, too—now, someone with a pension in Malaysia or Norway can unwittingly be an investor in American insurance company which has to pay for climate-disaster damages in Kansas. Solved problem—we've integrated the economy in this way as a thing of unprecedented reach.

But tomorrow's problems? Which are becoming more and more evident...today? Take a hard look around the globe. What do you see? Here's what CEOs see, and you can take a look at any number of CEO-agenda style research to back it up. A world of rising geopolitical tension. One of fragmenting societies. Where social contracts are being pushed to the brink, and extremism's rising. Meanwhile, climate change's mega-scale impacts are arriving...now...decades ahead of schedule. Economies are predicted to stagnate for the rest of this decade, more or less—and what happens after that isn't going to be pretty.

Tomorrow's problems? which are becoming today's? They're the Big Ones. They're new ones. They're not the old ones of profit, scale, and reach. So what are they? Well, I'd put them like this.

Leaving the world a better place than you found it. Some people might think of that as idealism, yet it's anything but. Good luck to you if you're not aboard that boat, because the one we're on...is sinking. Organizations today have real work to do. We're still a civilization dependent to about 80% or so on fossil fuels, and that's understandable, because they've powered centuries of growth. But now? We've got to make an energy transition—the greatest in human history, which will reshape everything. And that's about reinventing everything, too, from manufacturing, to governance, to leadership, to priorities.

So this problem's about investment, not just profit-maximization. And that's hard, because it's unclear. The old problem of maximizing profits? Hire an investment bank, a management consultancy, a brand agency—job done. But now? To do this work? The work of the 21st century? Leaving the world a better place than you found it? Investing in next-generation...everything? Time to get real—and innovate at a high level again, institutionally, managerially, economically, systemically. You have to do this work—you and you alone, because now? It's the only authentic source of competitive advantage left that there is.

That brings me to problem number two, which is building the future, not just surviving it. As we solved the problems of profit, reach, and scale, we learned how to build organizations that could last...a hundred years or so. They're some of the world's most iconic brands today. But now? Are they going to last for another hundred? What about another two hundred? Three?

We don't know how to build organizations that last on those timescales. And yet this is one of the great challenges of now, because of course those organizations will also be building systems, pathways, infrastructures, ideas that are now meant to last. When we talk about "preventing climate change" or "transcending geopolitical tension" or "redefining governance" that's what we really mean in a deeper sense. Building stuff that can last...a lot longer...than the last generation of successful organizations did. That isn't going to fizzle out in another decade or three or even five.

We don't know how to solve this problem, even remotely, yet. Who do you hire to tell you how to do this? Most of the advisors on the list above, investment banks, consultancies, brand agencies—they'll talk to you about next quarter. Because of course our focus became ultra myopic. Now as our time horizons extend, and we contend with building organizations and systems that are going to be around after things like climate change or the current wave of geopolitical tension...we're not just talking about those who can somehow straggle along desperately and somehow survive it, but those who can build, imagine, create, construct, innovate for a world and an age beyond it.

How do you do that? That brings me to problem number three, which is about existence, how you matter, why, to whom, not just what we used to call "vision." Right about now, our economies and societies are facing existential crises. Why do they exist? What's their point. Just to create mass stagnation and set people at each others' throats? Bad answer. Tensions rise. But organizations exist in that matrix, and they face this question, too.

Why do most organizations exist right now? Get beyond the prettified nostrums of vision and mission, and the real answer, too often, comes right back to...profit, scale, and reach. We exist to make even more money! By...being bigger than the next guy! And we do that by bombarding even more people with noise, stuff, from products to "likes," than our competitors! Bad answers.

Because they have no resonance—none—in the world we live in now. Nobody cares about organizations like this. Not employees. Not customers. Not their managers. Not even, really shareholders, whose horizons, at least at the institutional scale, are shifting outwards and upwards, towards the long-term and the holistic senses of governance and performance. Organizations like this are living under a death sentence of their own cynicism and indifference, they just don't know it yet. The first chance they get? Everyone—customers, shareholders, employees, managers—flees.

Smarter organizations, right about now, know this—and so they're groping for a point. A reason. A good answer to the question: why do we exist now? Or at least a better one than the Industrial Age, or even Information Age ones of profit, reach, scale, and profit. Only good answers to that question—ones that make sense in light of today's Existential Threats to civilization, society, our economies, from climate change to fanaticism to stagnation—count anymore. Really good ones. We're here to make your life better in this way, positive, concrete, real, tangible, not just some imaginary emotional Mad Men era benefit, not to hurt you, leave you worse off, devalue and dehumanize you, make your increasingly tenuous place in this destabilizing world even more precarious.

Tough question to answer. Yet answering it well is the agenda of the 21st century. All the rest flows from there. So if you're thinking about the future—begin at the beginning, which is also the ending, the end, the point, the purpose, what matters. Tomorrow's problems are here today, but tomorrow's organizations aren't. Those that get there first? That's what the real race in this century is about, not solving yesterday's problems.

??

Umair