My conversations with leaders in organizations revolve around a very common theme – chaos! While many thought they had learned how to navigate turbulent times that include significant economic swings, social and political upheaval, a pandemic, and significantly changing workforce dynamics, few feel prepared for the current climate. Regardless of your political views, no one can deny that the US is facing fundamental change. Forces are attempting to reshape the role of government, the structure of the economy, global trade, and the role of the US in the world, leaving nearly no economic, political, or social sector untouched. And all of this change has served to highlight the inextricable link between government and the private sector that dramatically accelerated post-pandemic. Many organizations have realized their strategic plans are significantly disrupted by the current environment, and most are even struggling with the relevance of their short-term plans.
As we have discussed in previous blog posts, times like these highlight the imperative of building both agility and resilience in an organization. Both are needed to respond to the rapidly shifting landscape and to weather current conditions. But for most organizations, the opportunity to build the required agility and resilience is too long of a journey. More immediate actions are needed to survive in this environment. So, what should the key focus points for organizations be? There are 3 rapid and concrete strategies that organizations can focus on:
- Continuous Strategy Re-Calibration: Organizations must take the typical process of scanning the environment, analyzing trends, anticipating changes and re-calibrating strategy from an annual process to a near real-time one. This means significantly increasing the capabilities of the organization to scan the environment, gather intelligence, analyze it, synthesize options, and determine action plans. The organization must also be ready to rapidly change direction and respond to ongoing changes in the marketplace with flexible resource deployment and the willingness to quickly move as the environment dictates. This requires changing several key strategy processes, as well as having the right measures in place to evaluate options and outcomes.
- Dynamic Workforce Planning: One of the most challenging elements of the current environment is determining the right workforce strategies, skills, capabilities, costs, locations, and deployments. Organizations are still generally terrible at being nimble with their talent due to long recruiting cycles, unpredictable retention, managing chronic lags in productivity, and ineffective use of contingent resources. Again, this requires a different model of workforce planning and management than most organizations have – one that is far faster, flexible, and responsive.
- Rapid Capability Building: Organizations must be able to take the previous two strategies and translate those into new organization capabilities at speed. At an organization level, a capability is more than just a set of skills – it is the ability of the organization to actually execute and leverage its people and technology resources to do what needs to be done. For example, many organizations are facing total disruption in their supply chain from a cost and availability perspective. Companies cannot simply raise prices without negatively impacting demand (and potentially creating a revenue spiral), so how can they rapidly redefine strategies and take advantage of the opportunities that this market creates?
The speed at which these actions need to take place is well beyond anything that has been faced since the pandemic, and the uncertainty as to how things will shift again is likely only rivaled by the pandemic in recent times. These changes and strategy imperatives are just as important to the public sector as the private sector. Governments are facing rapid changes in funding sources and impacts to their communities from policies and programs at a large scale and rapid pace that demand immediate response.
Where do organizations begin? Each organization must honestly assess if it has the ability to assess and shift its strategies, workforce, and capability at the speed required. If the answer isn’t an emphatic “yes” then it is actually “no”. If you aren’t already doing these things, you can’t start doing them fast enough without help. You need a partner that has been helping organizations build these capabilities long before the current challenges became the focus. Our consultants have been helping organizations build these capabilities for nearly 15 years and we know how to help you transform your capabilities quickly. Contact us to find out where your gaps lie and how we can help.
