It is essential for companies to foster an environment in which there are changes. The best way to ensure your company's adaptability to change is to become the agent of change in your industry. Use your strategy meetings to identify new ways to marginalize your own company or that of a competitor. Talk about how you would implement that change.
As you develop your ability to analyze change scenarios, your own ability to adapt to any sudden change will improve. Our research confirms this adaptation imperative. Adaptability is having easy access to a variety of behaviors that allow leaders to change and experiment as things change.
Strategic
flexibility allows your company to adapt and change to succeed.Rather than rigidly defining success as an outcome that is achieved through a single, predetermined method, companies with strategic flexibility expand their definition of success to encompass several methods and outcomes, while still maintaining sufficient specificity to know how to move forward most effectively. Nowadays, it's all too easy to react too aggressively to macroeconomic and geopolitical news. Roy recommends considering the following principles to help achieve flexible strategic planning. While it's impossible to anticipate all of the changes, you can better prepare for them if you take a broader perspective.
Organizations that succeed in difficult periods remain firm in their vision and strategy, while maintaining flexibility in the path they take to achieve those objectives. For leading companies, there is clarity around how the strategic plan will fulfill the organization's vision and mission. Having a team full of creative and resilient problem solvers will ensure that your company can adapt to anything. Employees follow instructions from their leaders on how to respond, so you need your own point of view on how to accept, embrace, and lead change.
Leaders who have cognitive flexibility are able to incorporate different thinking strategies and mental frameworks into planning, decision-making, and managing daily work. No strategy will be flexible or effective if the entire organization doesn't agree on what success means. Whether it's a global pandemic, an economic recession, a new regulation, a cultural change, or a change in customer expectations, your strategic plan must be able to adapt to unforeseen circumstances. Reimagine and continually evaluate your current strategies, initiatives, and processes to identify which aspects of them should be adjusted based on the current environment.
Whether you needed to use a video chat platform for remote work, a virtual school, an online church, family reunions, social distance weddings, or anything else, Zoom was most people's first choice because it had the strategic flexibility to see an opportunity and seize it. However, too many business leaders take the “set it and forget it” approach to strategic planning, barely taking a second look at their plan until it's time to reevaluate it the following year. To ensure that your strategy remains flexible enough to adapt to changing conditions and environments, consider these eight tips:
- Become the agent of change in your industry.
- Analyze change scenarios.
- Expand your definition of success.
- Take a broader perspective.
- Stay firm in your vision and strategy.
- Have clarity around how the strategic plan will fulfill the organization's vision and mission.
- Have a team full of creative and resilient problem solvers.
- Reimagine and continually evaluate current strategies.
