Keys To Becoming A Future Ready Company

The organizational adrenaline that helped many companies get things done quickly and well during the pandemic’s early days has, in many cases, been replaced by fatigue. Yet even as leaders take action to reenergize their people and organizations, the most forward-looking see a larger opportunity: the chance to build on pandemic-related accomplishments and reexamine (or even reimagine) the organization’s identity, how it works, and how it grows.

What many leaders feared, and the pandemic confirms, is that their companies were organized for a world that is disappearing, an era of standardization and predictability that’s being overwritten by four big trends: a combination of heightened connectivity, lower transaction costs, unprecedented automation, and shifting demographics.

While no organization has yet cracked the code, the experimentation underway suggests that future-ready companies share three characteristics: they know who they are and what they stand for; they operate with a fixation on speed and simplicity; and they grow by scaling up their ability to learn, innovate, and seek good ideas regardless of their origin. By embracing these fundamentals, companies will improve their odds of thriving in the next normal.

The bad news? Companies have zero time to lose. The good news? Not only do these same top performers offer hints at what a better organization could look like, but companies everywhere are recognizing that the pandemic offers a once-in-a-generation opportunity for change.

To define “radically better” for organizations, you should need to implement these nine imperatives:

Who we are:

1. Take a stance on purpose: set the company’s purpose in motion; help make it real for people. This only happens when employees identify with and feel connected to their company’s purpose. When centered at the heart of work, purpose helps people navigate uncertainty, inspires commitment, and even reveals untapped market potential. Future-ready organizations will clearly articulate what they stand for, why they exist and will use purpose as the glue to connect employees and other stakeholders in ways that inform their business choices.
2. Sharpen your value agenda: a map that disaggregates a company’s ambitions and targets into tangible organizational elements such as business units, regions, product lines, and even key capabilities. Armed with such a depiction, these companies can articulate where value is created in the organization, what sets the company apart from the pack, and even what might propel its success in the future.
3. Use culture as your ‘secret sauce’: In addition to having a clear why (purpose) and what (a value agenda), companies that thrive in the next normal will distinguish themselves by their cultures: the how of any organization. Culture is that unique set of behaviors, rituals, symbols, and experiences that collectively describes “how we run things.” Among the most successful companies, culture forms the backbone of organizational health and fuels sustained outperformance over time: companies with strong cultures achieve up to three times higher total returns to shareholders than companies without them.

How we operate

4. Radically flatten structure: Future-ready organizations structure themselves in ways that make them fitter, flatter, faster, and far better at unlocking considerable value. Their goal isn’t to eradicate hierarchy so much as make it less important as an organizing mechanism. They flatten the organization and adopt the simplest P&L structure possible, reinforcing business objectives with clear, strong performance management and other mechanisms.

5. Turbocharge decision making: Achieving quality and speed in tandem takes work. It requires a system that properly allocates decisions to the right executives, teams, individuals, or even algorithms (empowerment). The top team needs to focus its time and energy on the core business decisions that only it can make, such as those initiatives central to the value agenda. Other leaders, meanwhile, should spend more time deciding on resource and talent allocation for those initiatives. Top of mind for everyone should be who is working on what. Through managing the backlog of resources from the top of the house, organizations will speed up and increase the quality of decisions.

6. Treat talent as scarcer than capital: op companies will anchor the effort to a bedrock principle: our talent is our scarcest resource. Then they’ll zero in on three core questions: What talent do we need? How can we attract it? And how can we manage talent most effectively to deliver on our value agenda? Future-ready companies see that a talent ecosystem often allows for the best management and allocation of top talent.

How we grow

7. Adopt an ecosystem view: Future-proof organizations will recognize that traditional understandings about what an organization is and where its boundaries lie are being upended. The old thinking was all about gaining leverage and controlling the supply chain. Increasingly, however, value is created through networks where partners share data, code, and skills; where communities of businesses create value and antifragility together. Successful companies need to excel at blurring boundaries, taking a systems view rather than a mechanistic one, and embracing fluidity over fixed plans. Future-ready organizations view partners as extensions of themselves. These relationships feature porous boundaries and high levels of trust and mutual dependence to share value and let each partner focus on what it does best.

8. Build a data-rich tech platform: Future-proof companies take data seriously. For them, data isn’t simply about reporting what is happening in the business or answering a business question. Data is the business. To make the most of data, leading organizations must tackle a complex set of tasks. They must create compelling approaches to data governance, redesign processes as modular applications, tap the benefits of scalable cloud-based technology, and support all this through variable-cost technology budgets that are reallocated dynamically. By seizing upon data’s ability to connect and scale, these companies will be able to develop new products, services, and even businesses in fast release-and-upgrade cycles.

9. Accelerate learning as an organization: This underscores the urgency of the final organizational imperative, the one that helps make the others go: accelerate learning. Companies need to get learning right to fuel their talent engine and create an empowered workforce that’s fluent in the art of “fail fast, learn, and repeat”. High performing companies promote a mindset of continuous learning that encourages and supports people to adapt and reinvent themselves to meet shifting needs. Getting to this level requires instilling a growth mindset, curiosity, and an openness to experimentation and failure.

You can contact us at hello@qhala.com if you need to know how to be successful in your Digital Transformation journey.