Adapt and change or perish

Business and risk landscape is continuously changing and evolving radically. Threats are coming harder and faster, from all directions, and in more subtly varied forms. The only solution is to build organisations that are agile, adaptable, and sustainable. Organisations that can survive and thrive amid disorder emerge stronger than before.

Planning for, and managing and responding to change is the essence of any corporate strategy. As organisations are constantly adapting to the changing world, to new technologies or to new ways of doing things, a sound corporate strategy should clearly and regularly communicate a change agenda to employees so that they can always be flexible and resilient. Change is a given.

Speed, adaptability, and agility can be strategic differentiators. Find the real source of competitive advantage in management’s ability to consolidate enterprise-wide technologies and skills into capabilities and competencies that effectively empower individuals to adapt quickly to the changing opportunities and context. Organisations should also demonstrate the ability to execute well when new strategic opportunities arise.

There are three categories of change:

• Managing uncertainty in an operating environment (unpredictable world) — It is about recognising patterns and early warning signals, developing new solutions and approaches to novel problems, and building resilience against good and bad shocks.
• Managing organisation’s response and approach to uncertainty — It is about seeing the connections between emerging signals, building an agile organisational culture that can deal well with uncertainty, recruiting and developing the right people to respond quickly and creatively to the unexpected, and implementing appropriate counter-moves, initiatives and directions.
• Developing a new kind of management, leadership, and workforce for strategy execution — It is about organisational leadership bringing clarity and agility to an uncertain and often confusing world, and observe, understands, and react positively to uncertain situations and environment.