Feature | New capabilities for a fast-changing world
NEW CAPABILITIES
FOR A FAST-CHANGING WORLD The world is changing faster and perhaps more, this decade, than any other in living memory. While the forces of change are mostly coming from outside our businesses, we need to ‘future proof’ ourselves and indeed seek advantage from the changes by adapting and proacting at both the firm level and as individuals. Forces acting exogenously on our economy and professional service firms have included the pandemic, revolutionary new technologies, geopolitical elements, climate-induced changes and generationally changing cultural expectations of new entrants into our workforces. At the firm/ business level, most organisations have long realised that there is not much point making five year plans anymore, because the inherent assumptions within such plans will always become invalid within a year or two, rendering such plans invalid, and indeed sometimes destroying value. Instead, it seems more sensible to make one year plans, relate these to operational capabilities and the order book, and focus on developing key capabilities. These capabilities should be the focus of investment in our professional service firms, being aimed at coping with the fast-changing world referred to above. Specifically, these are agility and resilience, that refer to the firm’s ability to flex as conditions around it, such as market forces and technology, change, and the ability to anticipate, cope with and achieve advantage from such changes. These capabilities require great leadership and a ‘growth’ mindset, culture to suit, and flexible systems that will deliver the services that remain at the cutting edge of meeting clients’ requirements in our dynamic circumstances. At the individual level, we should all enhance our own personal competitiveness and contribution, by ensuring our personal capabilities make us each ‘fit for purpose’ for the new world volatility.
50 Consulting Matters
Some key elements1 are: 1. Self-leadership, sometimes called distributed leadership, or as labelled in one of my client firms, ‘leadership at all levels’, this means having the right behaviours in place, accountabilities, responsibilities being devolved and accepted by all, for making decisions and delivering on commitments: for everybody. When everyone exhibits these self-leadership behaviours strongly, culture and people management become easy. 2. Marketing, where indeed everybody in the firm is involved in marketing, being the positioning, profiling, client matching, pitching and profiting from the work. If it’s not a direct marketing role or client facing activity of service delivery, it is an indirect or support role, with a clear ‘marketing orientation’ for everyone to bring to work. 3. Strategy and operations, involving contributing to and implementing the firm’s vision and strategic priorities, linking these to our everyday activities, and pursuing ‘operational excellence’ in terms of right first time, waste reduction and lean / flow work systems in what we produce and deliver to clients. 4. Sustainability/ ESG (environmental, social, governance) represents a growing opportunity for contributing at the individual, project and firm levels to a broader set of outcomes than purely financial, finding win-win solution for all stakeholders, through ‘doing well by doing good’, and engendering a ‘sustainability orientation’ in firm culture. 5. Innovation, including digitalisation-enabled transformations are sweeping through industries and economies, driving efficiencies and service levels to new heights, and leaving laggards behind, requiring us all to be capable of getting on board.