England’s Confusing Re-opening Underscores Need for Business Agility
In disruptive conditions, the items on a business’ 5-year plan may as well be thrown on a trash heap. The British companies that are engaging with England’s shaky re-opening are learning this better than most. There—as with businesses across the globe—we hope the value of the expedient catalytic action becomes clear.
England is easing its pandemic lockdown in light of its devastated economic conditions. From March to February, the country’s gross domestic product shrank by a record 5.8%. However, its government is moving tentatively; with over 40,000 COVID deaths logged, England is Europe’s worst-hit country.
Talk about being caught between a rock and a hard place.
Consequently, messages have been mixed. People should work but not use transit. People should work but not send their children to school. As workers in manufacturing and other industries are being encouraged to get back to work, criticism of Boris Johnson’s government has been widespread. There is mass confusion over which actions are “safe” and which are not.
England is the poster child for the graceless, confusing stumble out of lockdown that every nation, eventually, will experience. In this emerging COVID economy, we hope that every company will learn the value of the short, sharp, low-investment catalytic action.
Catalytic actions are part of the agile approach to strategy that we taught in Disrupted: Strategy for Exponential Change; we discuss them in the excerpt below. We define catalytic action as a targeted action that stimulates a system of events, resulting in maximum value generation at minimum cost. It’s a way of “pinging” your conditions to see what works, and what doesn’t. It’s about experimenting, failing fast, moving on quickly—and repeating the process until you strike gold.
We have no choice but to move away from the 5 year-plan approach at this point. How can businesses figure out how to operate in a chaotic arena like this? Only by adopting a new mentality, a new willingness to engage in low-cost experimentation. We must all become much more comfortable with planning out our action steps in shorter and shorter intervals.
The businesses that survive this strange period of re-orientation will find an approach that best aligns with people’s needs—for safety, for value, and so much more. That approach can’t necessarily be articulated by government. And it certainly won’t be found in the “strategic plans” we made in an increasingly distant era.
If you’re running a business, how do you believe you can you meet people’s needs now? And will you do today to test that belief?
Larry and David
Anatomy of an Ideal Catalytic Action
Is there a way to break down what makes an ideal catalytic action tick? What does an ideal catalytic action do?
In sum, an ideal catalytic action stimulates a system of events that results in maximum value generation at minimum cost. To do this—to create more with less, to fire up capabilities that act like 1 plus 1 equaling 3 (or much, much more)— catalytic actions must be expedient, momentum building, and timely. Let’s take a closer look at one of these.
Expedient
Let’s revisit that hermetically sealed executive office where a five-to-ten year plan is being painfully gestated. In this slow-motion reality, elaborate documents are being created with columns dictating how they will manage and measure each step of the coming decade.
This approach is confined to linear timeframes, and doesn’t allow for expedient, dynamic bursts of exponential action as conditions change.
The trajectory of a traditional plan is assumed to be predictable. There is a firm set of pre-conceived projects and actions. These plans are put into motion with careful and controlled behavior and an expectation that everything will elegantly cruise from one step to the next with guaranteed outcomes along the way. And if there are changes in the conditions along the way, they will be ignored because they might interfere with the “plan”. Ultimately, this approach becomes more about working through whatever the plan dictates rather than achieving the desired end result in the most expedient manner available.
This is plan-manage-measure. And it’s not the way the world works. Not anymore.
By contrast, catalytic actions are designed to be expedient, so that they move in the flow of exponentially accelerating time. That is, the lag time between formulating strategy and taking specific catalytic action is minimal, since we know conditions always shift. In a fast-changing world, planning actions for the future based on an expectation that conditions will remain stable and predictable is a recipe for certain discontinuity.
Remember that the SiA algorithm is a wheel that turns rapidly—rapidly enough to keep pace with the exponentially accelerating change cycles of the disruptive era. Turnover of decision-to-action has to be timely. Catalytic actions drive capability through strategic opportunity-risks and conditions that are shifting with increasing velocity.
A Series of Insights from Disrupted, the Book
Written in 2015, Disrupted was, and still is, both a book ahead of its time, and a timely guide for those committed to understanding and addressing the complexity of disruptive change, preparing for disruption, and critically, leveraging disruption to generate sustainable value.
This series of articles are extracts — some with comment from the authors — from the book and are intended to highlight some of the key concepts captured in Disrupted.
A must read (if) you want to understand the world of today and tomorrow, and look forward to the future rather than fearing it.
- Phil Ruthven, Founder, IBISWorld
To find out more visit: www.resilientfutures.com/disrupted
