WHAT HAPPENS AFTER WHAT COMES NEXT?

PREPARING FOR A DECADE OF DISRUPTION

Towards the end of 2021, Hazlewoods invited business leaders to attend an interactive, online presentation with internationally recognised futurist, Graeme Codrington. Graeme joined us to help understand the forces that will shape our lives in the next 10 years, and how we can respond in order to confidently stay ahead of change. In this article, we summarise some of Graeme’s thoughts.

PREPARE FOR DISRUPTION

The next 10 years are likely to see more change than the last 30 or 40 years combined. We have spent the last few decades creating building blocks for change, such as the internet, smartphones, and different technologies, that are now going to accelerate transformation across industries. Furthermore, there are political changes, economic shifts, geopolitical upheaval, extreme weather pushing quickly towards a green agenda, and much more.

IT IS NOT ALL DOOM AND GLOOM

There are some really positive changes coming in the next 10 years that are going to remarkably change our world. In the medical and pharmaceutical arena, COVID-19 has allowed medical development to speed up dramatically, and experts will be able to take some of the mRNA advances that have been proven in delivering vaccines and apply those in other areas. CRISPR was the technology that was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2020, and it is the next step beyond mRNA. Researchers hope to use it to alter human genes to eliminate diseases; create hardier plants; wipe out pathogens and more.

CHANGES IN THE RULES FOR SUCCESS AND FAILURE

It is important to understand what the norms and standards are in an industry, i.e., how an industry is structured and how businesses operate within that, almost uniformly. If leaders look forward a decade, it is likely that at least some of these norms and standards will have changed. For example, by 2031 will professional services still be charging by the hour? Is it more likely that, between now and the end of the 2020s a lot of the work that needs to be done in accounting, tax and audit is going to be driven by machines? To prepare for the future, leaders should contemplate what might be a surprise to them in their industry that is not a surprise to anybody else who is looking from the outside in. The danger is that they fail to see what everybody else sees.

EXPECT DISRUPTION

The disruption that is coming is not just going to happen around the edges of industries. Disruptions will cause more than price increases or decreases, or faster or slower operations. There are structural changes that will affect the core of all industries that businesses should be assessing and preparing for on a continual basis. The place to start, is to engineer agility and flexibility into the heart of the business with four key changes. A simple idea borrowed from an adaptive leadership model developed by Professor Ron Heifetz at Harvard; there is the dance floor with people dancing - the dance is the work that has to be done. Leaders will spend most of their time dancing, but not enough time walking off the dance floor, climbing up the stairs and getting on the balcony. The ideal is gaining a big picture perspective, or a more strategic mindset. The challenge as a leader is making sure that time on the balcony is scheduled into your weekly activities and is not a random afterthought in your spare time, which it often can become.

1.

SPEND MORE TIME ON THE BALCONY

2.

ASK BETTER QUESTIONS

Too often, questions in business are about tasks, or about the job that has to be done. The question often asked is:

“Are we doing things right?”

The better question to ask is:

“Are we doing the right things?”

What are we measuring and what might be the unintended consequences of the things we measure? Why are we measuring what we measure? The benefit comes from taking a step back and asking whether what a business is doing is still appropriate in their changing industry.

3.

DISTRIBUTE DECISION MAKING IN YOUR BUSINESS

With an uncertain future, leaders need to ensure that people in their business have been given the responsibility to make decisions. To enable a business to be flexible and adaptable to change, everyone should feel that they have been given the authority to make responsive decisions to market changes at their level. A business without this will have more unnecessary meetings and decision-making by committee, wasting time and energy which could be spent elsewhere.

4.

EXPERIMENT MORE

Build a culture of experimentation and encourage people to try doing things differently. Rather than ‘thinking big’, try thinking small. Small experiments, not big business projects that will be expensive if they fail, will help to build adaptability in an uncertain time.

In conclusion, the last two years have clearly demonstrated that we cannot predict the future with clarity, but we can prepare by engineering adaptability and innovation into the DNA of our businesses. To make sure you are receiving invitations to our events, sign up here: hazlewoods.co.uk/preference-centre