Adaptability: how to give your strategy the last laugh

From personal experience, I know that it’s easier to pick the winner of the Grand National than to accurately predict sales of disruptive bleeding-edge technology. So when, a few years ago, I was asked as part of the strategy to forecast the annual volumes of a prototype through to (wait for it…) 2022, I laughed like I was watching an Only Fools and Horses Christmas special.

A strategy gives us a sense of purpose, because it confirms what game we’re in. It allays uncertainty, because it illustrates our future. And it raises our spirits, because it describes how we’ll win. It’s easy to see then, why we spend so much time crafting this corporate comfort blanket.

I reckon however, that we should be spending less time constructing the strategy – which is a specific change – and more time building a workforce that is adaptable to any type of change. Because let’s face it, if we were really that good at predicting the future, we would be relaxing on our own Caribbean islands by now.

Consider this: if we spend no more than 1% of our working lives (around 2 days per year) developing the adaptability intelligence of our staff, they will be better equipped to manage how people think, feel, and act, in response to change. The practical benefit is that as soon as the ink on the strategy is dry, everyone will be ‘already ready’ to implement it. Not only will this steal a march on the competition, but also the faster a strategy is implemented, the less time the external environment has to start heading off at a tangent.

So the next time your market adopts disruptive technology, but in ways that no-one could have predicted, your people could be more ready, willing, and able to hit a moving target. The laughing will then be generated by the receipt of the customer’s purchase order, not the company’s strategy.