Navigating Rugged Landscapes

The business landscape has been dramatically transformed in the past one year from a smooth, undulating terrain to an intensely rugged one. The "fitness" of many organisations on this landscape has been altered, perhaps forever.

We know that extinction is the inevitable fate of most organisations; 99% of companies that have ever existed are now extinct since their "fitness" declined over time. Crisis, such as this pandemic, often accelerates this eventuality.

While periodic disruptions of business are inevitable, windows of opportunity exist that allow companies to reinvent themselves. Emerging from these crises though, requires an "adaptive" strategic response, not a traditional, tactical one.

Five questions are important for leaders to consider:

• How should you leverage periods of turbulence to build a more robust and resilient strategy?

• Is your organisation still at the peak of fitness, or are you sliding downwards to the bottom of a valley?

• Should you now choose to do an “adaptive walk”, or should you choose to do a “random jump”?

• Should you push your organisation towards greater order, or towards greater chaos to manage the uncertainty?

• Should you capitalise on this period to transform to a specialist organisation?

“To build organisational resilience, business strategy should not be modelled on linear, Newtonian logic, but on adaptive, Darwinian principles.” - Jay Desai

Three “adaptive strategies” are important for leaders to now execute:

Assess Fitness Landscape –

Navigate the rugged business landscape with strategies that explore adjacencies (adaptive walks) and diversification (random jumps), to improve organisational fitness

Adopt Emergent Opportunities –

Systematically capitalise on accidental events (emergence) and not solely rely on deliberately planned strategies

Activate Multiple Strategies –

Run multiple, divergent business strategies simultaneously (parallelism), as far as practically possible.

These three “adaptive strategies” can help leaders build organisational resilience to traverse a complex world.