Renounce adaptation, robustness and even ‘flexibility’ in favour of ‘taking any opportunity to do things you think you could not do before’ (Rahm Emanuel). And that means scary reinvention.
Adaptation is survival. Readiness in the new organization is preparedness for winning, for being ahead of the game, for reinventing. Call it as you wish, but it’s not adaptation.
It’s not robustness either. A rhino is very robust. And an elephant.
It’s not even flexibility, which is a form of sophisticated survival.
In the new organizational readiness, coming out of a crisis, of a tension, of an inflection point, is doing so by being much stronger than when the whole thing started. It is about creating a new baseline, a new normal, in which things are progressively much better, more sophisticated, more elevated, more able. That has nothing to do with robustness, flexibility and adaptation. The closest description for that ‘new readiness’ is Nassin Taleb’s ‘antifragile’, a concept that his hypertrophic mind has not elaborated well on in organizational terms (see however ‘The Antifragility Edge: Antifragility in Practice’ Paperback – December 13, 2016, by Si Alhir)
Forget robust and forget the tanks. It’s guerrilla and it’s gazelle/cheetah/falcon in the project team. It’s continuous reinventing, not continuous improvement. I do not mean continuous reinventing of everything: business model, operations, strategy implementation. I mean, any next stage (post-crisis, post-challenge) is much better than the original. Any problem solving not only solves the problem but takes the organization to its next stage of possibilities. Never return to the baseline. The new baseline is higher, better, more sophisticated.
The four drivers for readiness:
- Rapid Reaction and Reconfiguration (RRR)
- Focus on your ‘social algorithms’ (non-negotiable behaviours)
- Build-in reboot systems
- Renounce adaptation and robustness. It means scary reinvention
It’s a package. There is no guarantee that the package will solve your future, but without it, it’s going to be very difficult.
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New webinar series launching in June.
Feed Forward webinar series – the organization now, under new management
Machines work on feed-back. Minds work on feed-forward. We don’t need thermostats; we need new compasses. There is no ‘back to normal’. Normal has not been waiting for us. Leandro Herrero
To change to ‘the new normal’ we must think and act differently in the management of our organizations. Join Leandro Herrero and his team of organizational architects for these 5, free webinars as they debunk uncontested assumptions and uncover the alternatives, whilst considering why this is even more relevant today in the current exceptional environment. Join us and bring your critical thinking brain, switched on. It’s a serious business. It may also be fun.
All attendees receive a complimentary copy of The Flipping Point.
Webinar topics:
- The myths of change.
- Can we put the company in an MRI? Can we diagnose its health in terms of its internal connectivity, communication and collaboration?
- The myths of company culture.
- The myths of management.
- High touch and high tech in the digitalisation era
Request more information about these webinars.
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