Major impact events coming? Certain. Nature, magnitude, and timing? Mostly unforeseeable. These just happen, whether by fate, predestination, or a random dice-thrower. All you know for sure is that some big things are coming along. The best you can do in this case is to identify your points of greatest vulnerability and to figure out how to minimize the impact effects.
At long last things are getting back to normal. Masks mostly gone. Distancing mostly gone. Occupancy limits mostly gone. Huge numbers vaccinated. We are back on the road to serious economic recovery, yes? Well, such hope is nice but reality is rarely nice. What if reality is still in charge? How vulnerable is your business to the next black swan or even lesser hits? How much might not knowing cost you?
Constant change is our new normal. Not stability but change itself. This means that success in such a world requires constant change – adaptation – in our businesses. No more business-as-usual. Success going forward involves agility, adaptability, and resilience. In this post, adaptability assessment and improvement are addressed.
Disaster in the form of a black swan is quite often the first indication of excess complexity. From a management viewpoint, this is not a good way to find out. Unfortunately, there are not many effective ways to gauge complexity levels. Here are a few ways to deal constructively with largely invisible complexity before it morphs into a black swan event.
Being among the best at something in business works great in stable times but can be fatal in black swan times. It seems that black swan times are with us for some unforeseeable period so specialization has become a serious vulnerability. The solution here is diversification – adding business units that are not likely to be impacted in the way that your core business can be.
