‘Remote’, ‘hybrid’ and ‘blended working', ‘zero travel policy’ ‘last mile connectivity’ ‘furlough’ and of course ‘staycation’ sprung up in the 2021 urban dictionary. That parish focus has changed and today we focus on 'sustainable resilience', 'stakeholder impact', and 'geopolitical intelligence' For many these were all unimagined factors and unbudgeted future programmes. But we muse, these are classic effects of major crises outside our control.
We have been waiting to see the long term, post event, behavioural changes and how they will affect the way people and businesses operate. Now we can and we are more resilient than we ever imagined, but that shouldn’t be a surprise.
Crises are steeped in forced and accelerated change. Much of it unpleasant. Human stress points, from conflicts to natural disasters have pushed the speed of adaptation ranging from economic and environment to munitions and medicine.
People are thinking differently. Behaviours have changed, now they are embedding.
In the past two years a small number of independent professional bodies have mapped out responses, challenges, and changes across the world. The heavy task has been to sift fact from opinion, data from interpretation, and evidence from political decisions.
The examination of this wide-ranging data makes very interesting reading. Its accuracy inevitably points us towards these future trends and the new world.
Smarter, Brighter Future
The unthinkable became reality. The ‘what if’ question became the ‘what now’ call as we scrambled home to close the doors and sit it out. Business leaders quietly reflected on the chaos of quickly made decisions in those cool days last March, as a tidal roar impacted each business in every location across the planet.
Our development, operations and risk decisions changed instantly to reflect the ability to continue services and focus on helping equally struggling clients and suppliers. Attitudes changed. But they have developed, rather than looking internal Ito protect our business needs are driving Board's to focus outside their mandate and comfortability, understand that they can and can not control. It is about significant mutual cooperation, intelligence, trust and adaptability
There is the need to prepare for the coming focus. For example: critical and vital supply chain management is impacted by geo-political events around the globe and already in the early stages of governance and regulation. Even before the global crisis we were already seeing perfectly healthy businesses falling into crippling crises as their outsourced or offshored suppliers strangled their ability to operate. The ownership of this risk is now firmly being passed back to the sponsor and shared with all stakeholders. Communication is key.
Some focus has quietly changed. The rise in aircraft sales, whilst we were not flying anywhere. The eyewatering losses in cruise operators which have turned to over demand and over priced this year. So, the data sets roll in with similar surprising revelations, all based on underlying facts. As we live in this connected global village, we can’t avoid these influences on our immediate communities. But knowledge gives us an advantage and that is the difference. Intelligence both in ability and knowledge.
“Creating a culture where people want to follow their vocation is key. Happy people own this business, and they make happy customers. Look at it like this. It’s like training a new soccer player from scratch, against a transfer price from another club. The cost of programmes like this are just a drop against the returns”.
The employee of course becomes the consumer and in turn leads the pack trend. Expectations are rising and attracting and retaining business is against a large growth of non-geographic competition, with lessons that have been learnt from our shared global experiences. With more choice driven by these accelerated changes, the marketplace can seem overwhelming to the consumer. But it’s not. Loyalty is also accessibility and delivery, in turn that means our reach here is also further.
Building and maintaining relationships, positive brands and reputation, valuable products, and services, together with the overall client experience is part of standing out from the competition. Being fleet of foot, agile and adaptable to change creates opportunities and advantages that others do not have.
Evidence in the data shows us that around the world smart businesses have focused their efforts on simple smart process that are best practices meeting risk, regulatory and governance requirements. They are resilient, secure and focused on their operations to minimise potential impacts to their consumers. Why?
Boards and Execs embrace these concepts of focusing on consolidating effort towards agility, all their stakeholders and sustainability in its true form. The fact is that many of the operating challenges have appeared in silos both inside and out: external instability, threat of attacks physical and digital, brand and reputation (perceived or otherwise) all impacts resilience.
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