The Great Balancing Act: Thriving in a Disruptive Business Environment

By Dr Syed Yaqzan and Dr Imran Zawwar, London Strategy Centre

Businesses today face an unprecedented and challenging time as they navigate through a range of competing concerns. On the one hand, they are under immense pressure due to the post-pandemic economic recovery, which has affected their revenue streams and disrupted their supply chains. On the other hand, the rising costs of doing business, such as energy and raw material costs, threaten their commercial viability. Adding to these complexities, the pressure from key stakeholders, such as governments and regulators, is pushing businesses to take more climate action, which requires significant investment and changes in their operational practices.

Balancing these competing concerns is a major challenge for businesses today, requiring agility and innovative thinking to thrive in this dynamic environment.

However, the upcoming decades are set to be a period of unprecedented transformations for humanity. The emergence of cutting-edge technologies, such as Artificial Intelligence (AI), is poised to revamp numerous fields, ranging from scientific discovery to human engagement and economics. AI has the potential to harness vast amounts of data and make breakthrough advances in areas such as healthcare, agriculture, education, and transportation. We are already seeing how AI can help doctors reduce medical mistakes, farmers improve yields, teachers customize instruction, and researchers unlock solutions to protect our planet.

In addition, AI for businesses, such as ChatGPT, can foster innovation by providing insights, automating processes, and enhancing decision-making. ChatGPT can also assist businesses in leveraging the metaverse, a three-dimensional virtual environment where people interact, by analyzing data and providing insights into user behaviour, market trends, and preferences.

Additionally, by automating virtual customer service and content creation, ChatGPT can improve the user experience and reduce costs, thereby unlocking new opportunities for organizations in this burgeoning field.

Moreover, technological advances also raise complex questions and concerns about their impact on society. Therefore, we must maintain an open and questioning mind while we seek to take advantage of the opportunities and address the challenges that AI and other new technologies create. One of the key questions about technological advances is how they will affect the planet, particularly given the urgency of challenges such as climate change and biodiversity loss. While past industrial revolutions have brought significant improvements in living standards, they have often achieved economic growth at the expense of the planet’s health. The current technological revolution must break this pattern and deliver sustainable economic growth.

Unfortunately, our achievements in the past century, which led to massive economic growth and vast improvements in human welfare, have also resulted in a planet under severe environmental duress. This has ushered in the Anthropocene era, where human activity is the principal force shaping our environment, causing unprecedented rates of change in our natural systems, including climate change, biodiversity loss, ocean warming and acidification, deforestation, as well as water and air pollution.

In addition to economic and environmental concerns, there are also important issues of justice to consider. The largest gains from AI adoption are experienced by the countries already at the forefront of this technology. Economic and climate inequalities will be exacerbated without incentives and policy change to ensure all regions are ready to capture these benefits. Moreover, the increasing adoption of AI technology also carries the risk of job displacement, highlighting the pressing need for upskilling and reskilling to avoid leaving people behind.

To make the most of AI and other new technologies, we need to think beyond the technology itself and consider its wider implications for society and the environment. This includes the need for strong ethical frameworks, the evolution of laws, the importance of education and training for new skills, and even labour market reforms. All these factors must come together if we are going to create a better future for everyone.

Finally, creating a better future requires a sense of shared responsibility. People from government, academia, business, civil society, and other interested stakeholders must come together to help shape this future. We need to work together not only within a single community or country but also on a global basis. Each of us has a responsibility to participate and an important role.

To succeed with this complex agenda in today’s dynamic business environment requires businesses to adopt a comprehensive and strategic approach incorporating innovation, leadership, and ethical considerations. However, innovation is a difficult pursuit for many companies, despite significant investments of time and money. Even successful innovators often struggle to sustain their performance. The problem with innovation improvement efforts is not simply a failure to execute; it is rooted in the lack of an innovation strategy.

A strategy is a commitment to a set of coherent, mutually reinforcing policies or behaviours aimed at achieving a specific future direction for the organization. Good strategies promote alignment among diverse groups within an organization, clarify objectives and priorities, and help focus efforts around them. However, firms rarely articulate strategies to align their innovation efforts with their business strategies.

Without an innovation strategy, innovation improvement efforts can easily become a ‘grab bag of much-touted best practices’, which involve trade-offs and generally require complementary changes to the rest of the organization’s innovation system. Therefore, a company without an innovation strategy won’t be able to make trade-off decisions and choose all the elements of the innovation system.

To address these challenges, an integrated framework is needed that presents how digital, sustainability, innovation, strategy, and leadership interact together. In an attempt to provide such a framework, the below diagram aims to look at the picture holistically. This may assist the executives to develop a set of coherent, mutually reinforcing policies or behaviours aimed at achieving a specific future direction for the organization in the future. Finally, this may also help to provide a food for thought and help catalyse a solution for today’s complex and emergent challenges.

About the authors

Dr Syed Yaqzan is an Assistant Professor and Industry Consultant for Sustainability and Net Zero business growth.

Dr Imran Zawwar is an executive development strategist with an interest in Business Strategy, Innovation, and Digital Transformation.

https://londonstrategycentre.com/