Is Your Organisation Future Ready?

By unfreezing past constraints, the wrecking ball of COVID-19 provided us with a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for driving change and transformation; excising the legacy technologies and legacy leadership approaches that stifle innovation.

The challenge for leaders now is to seize the moment, leveraging the innovations born of necessity over the last few years for building future ready organisations. Modern, resilient, intelligent, innovative, purpose-driven organisations fit-for-purpose in a VUCAD world (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, Ambiguous and Digital).

From surviving the pandemic to thriving in an era of pervasive uncertainty. An era characterised by geopolitical conflict, war, inflation, supply chain problems, environmental and energy concerns, people's well-being, inclusion, digital disruption, artificial intelligence, web3 and the 5th Industrial Revolution.

In a world of unprecedented change and digital disruption, tinkering is no longer an option. More radical, future-looking approaches are required.

A useful starting point is to evaluate your organisation’s future readiness; your own readiness as a future ready leader.

Assessing Your Organisation's Future Readiness

Future readiness should be assessed in five key areas:

Strategy

The starting point in building a future ready organisation is to undertake a blue-ocean, forward-looking and forward-thinking reassessment of your organisation’s core strategy and underlying business model for a volatile, digital world.

To what extent is your industry, your organisation, under threat of being disrupted? What are the key disruptive trends impacting the industry, the opportunities and threats for your organisation? Is your current strategy future-proof? What aspects of strategy need to be eliminated or reduced? What aspects need to be raised or created?

An honest self-evaluation of your organisation’s strategic readiness for a rapidly changing world provides a strong foundation for developing a forward-thinking and forward-looking strategic blueprint for thriving in an era of pervasive uncertainty.

Organisation, People & Culture (OPC)?

Future ready strategies and business models require future ready organisational structures, future ready people and future ready cultures. In a world of pervasive change, traditional top-down power structures, rule-choked people and cultures have become a liability.

Undertaking an OPC Dexterity Audit - an honest self-evaluation of your organisation’s structure, people and cultural readiness for the new future of work - provides a solid foundation for excising the legacy structures, management thinking and cultures that stifle innovation, agility and flexibility; replacing them with something better - an agile, modern, intelligent, human-focused, purpose-driven, future ready organisation.

Digital Mastery

To support modern operating models and ways of working, future ready organisations will need to leverage the full potential of existing and emerging technologies.

A helpful starting point is to undertake a Digital Mastery Assessment - an honest self-evaluation of your organisation’s digital readiness benchmarked against the rapid pace of technology change taking place.

This will provide a strong foundation for developing a forward-thinking and forward-looking digital blueprint for thriving as we enter a third phase of digital disruption involving the convergence of a broad range of disruptive technologies including AI, big data, the blockchain, IoT, low code, the metaverse, web3 and others.

Your Digital Mastery Assessment should cover two main areas:

Internal Digital?– the use of digital technology internally to improve operating efficiency, reduce costs, building an agile, fast-moving, responsive, collaborative, intelligent workplace fit-for-purpose in an era of turbulent change.

External Digital?– the use of digital technology and social media for external customer engagement; for enhancing the customer experience; for sales and marketing; supporting more rapid business growth, including internationalisation.

Orchestrating the Transformation

With transformation failure rates of 70 percent or more, does your organisation have the orchestration capabilities to successfully implement transformation programmes; overcoming the many barriers and obstacles to becoming future ready?

These are likely to include legacy management thinking and legacy technology; organisational inertia; resistance to change; fear; lack of awareness and understanding; bureaucracy; hierarchy; people; culture; time; resources; and leadership.

In a post-pandemic volatile world, change fatigue, anxiety, employee well-being, mental health and concerns about the future have also emerged as major barriers.

An honest self-evaluation of your organisation’s ability to orchestrate a successful transformation, the main barriers and obstacles to be overcome, will help you to develop a roadmap and action plan for ‘getting there’.

Leadership

Future ready organisations require future ready leaders.

Does your organisation have the leadership dexterity to survive and prosper in an era of pervasive uncertainty? What leadership improvements, at all levels, are required to build a future ready organisation? Is a new breed of leader urgently required? What leadership traits and approaches are eroding, enduring or emerging in the new future of work? Is it time to reimagine the whole concept of leadership itself for a VUCAD world.

A Leadership Dexterity Audit - an honest self-evaluation of the gap that exists in your organisation’s current leadership - provides a strong foundation for developing a forward-thinking and forward-looking approach to future ready leadership development.

PLEASE NOTE: We are using a very broad definition of the term ‘leadership’ here, not just the most senior people in your organisation. In an era of pervasive uncertainty everyone, at every level, has a leadership role to play.

The Future Ready Toolkits?

Even before COVID-19, many executives were worried that their companies were organised for a disappearing world.

For example, a January 2020 report by MITSloan concluded that:

"Only 12 percent of the senior executives surveyed ‘strongly agreed’ that business leaders in their organisation had the right mindsets to lead them forward in an uncertain world. Only 9 percent agreed that they had the skills at the top of their organisation to thrive in the digital economy.”?New Leadership Playbook for the Digital Age

Derived from best-practice thinking and research in this area, our recently developed Future Ready Toolkits ? present a very practical approach for reassessing your organisation’s underlying strategy and modus operandi for an era of pervasive uncertainty; re-energising and relaunching as appropriate.

There are five separate but related toolkits covering the key strategic, people, technology, orchestration and leadership challenges in future-proofing your organisation for a volatile and increasingly unpredictable world.

Strategic Readiness

Toolkit 1:?A scorched-earth, forward-looking reassessment of your core strategy and underlying business model.

OPC Dexterity Audit

Toolkit 2:?A self-evaluation of your organisation’s structure, people and cultural readiness for the new future of work.

Digital Mastery

Toolkit 3:?Your organisation's progress in leveraging the full potential of existing and emerging technologies.

Orchestration

Toolkit 4:?The HOW - your organisation's ability to orchestrate and implement a successful transformation.

Leadership

Toolkit 5:?An honest self-evaluation of your organisation's leadership dexterity for a volatile world.

Based on honest answers to a series of self-evaluation questions, each toolkit delivers a Future Readiness Scope for Improvement Score providing your organisation with a strong foundation for developing a forward-thinking and forward-looking strategic and operational blueprint for thriving in a VUCAD world.

Recommendations for improvement are automatically generated on completion of each Toolkit.

Please do not hesitate to let me know if you would like a free preview of the toolkits.

As always, comments and feedback are very welcome.

Take care.

Jim H