Three Meaningful Strategies for Managing Rapid Change
Faced with a need to adapt to a changing business environment, many companies opt for quick fixes that ultimately fail. But there are better options.
The last decade has shown that global, social, and marketplace shifts triggered by advances in technology and digital data — are rapidly transforming the nature of work and how existing organizations in both the private and public sector can best adapt to global change.
This explains the popularity of startups, which unlike existing organizations, lack legacy processes or technologies. Startup founders can reimagine a new way of doing business without the burden of how things “used to work” in their organization. Yet even startups today will accumulate similar legacy burdens. In the next three to four years how they previously worked when they started will no longer fit with the latest disruptive technology landscape, changing marketplace, and public demand.
So how can both established and relatively new organizations find new ways to be nimble and adaptive? How can organizations avoid the trap of becoming saddled with legacy processes, legacy technologies, or legacy ways of thinking?
There are three quick — yet ultimately superficial — adaptations that organizations confronting rapid change often find tempting, but should avoid. These apply to organizational change in general, and more specifically to organizations attempting digital transformations.
Organizations (and most people) aren’t prone to change when things are going well. When an organization is doing well, the few prescient voices scanning the future and urging the organization to change its business model are ignored, marginalized, or worse.
When the external environment in which an organization operates changes, and the existing business processes no longer work, there usually remains a lot of denial that the world has changed. Often leaders and managers will revert to the refrain of “if we just get back to our principles of X years ago, then the organization will be fine.” Organizations that deny the world has changed will push to work harder at the old business model, or perhaps make an incremental improvement, attempting to get back to the old days that were so successful. It’s only when things get truly bad that an organization might finally embrace those voices that express the urgent need to do something completely different in the new environment. This is akin to waiting until an airplane has unexpectedly descended from a cruising altitude of 38,000 feet to less than 2,000 feet with the hopes of pulling the plane, with all its weight and inertia, back up before it hits the ground.
In such “truly bad” scenarios, some organizations might risk doing one of the aforementioned quick yet ultimately superficial adaptations. It’s important to note that any one of those strategies isn’t entirely bad if there are more meaningful actions accompanying it. Leaders need to recognize that a quick adaptation rarely, if ever, helps an existing organization through the hard work of adapting to a changing world.
Here are three more meaningful strategies:
David A. Bray is an Eisenhower Fellow to Taiwan and Australia and was named one of the top “24 Americans Who Are Changing the World” by Business Insider in 2016.
Copyright © Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2017. All rights reserved.