Even in times of constant great change like today, life goes on. We “continue to continue”. But the real story here is that your goal should instead be “change to continue”. Success in a world of constant external change requires agile, adaptable, and resilient changes keeping pace with whatever your world is doing at each moment.
Emergence occurs where an entity is observed to have properties and behavior that its parts do not have on their own and that emerge only after the parts interact and adapt. The world has recently been undergoing a huge restructuring that creates new groupings, new interactions, and new behaviors. Emerging from this process will almost certainly be a business environment quite unlike anything we have ever experienced. It cannot be predicted.
Economists talk often about creative destruction to describe the disruptive process of transformation that accompanies innovation. Politics is a common context but the more important story for businesses involves change. Change is life and will always be with us. It is not change itself but your response to change that determines whether you win or lose.
The “brief” lockdowns, promised in March 2020, seem to have morphed into something more or less permanent – worldwide. One may argue that the basis for any continuation is deeply flawed but with most of the governments and media fully on board with the pandemic story, lockdowns may be with us – indefinitely. Might this actually be an opportunity?
Whatever is coming next is not foreseeable despite being termed the “New Normal”. It will surely be New but Normal? Not a chance. It will be very different and nothing like what most people expect. Business success in the New Whatever will require great organizational agility and adaptability. Does your business have what it takes?
