Different times call for different approaches to governance. Board members and leaders should start thinking about what to prioritize to better support companies in the restart phase after Covid-19. Five of my priorities are operational agility, accelerated innovation cycles, organizational resiliency, stakeholder eco-systems and sustainable development.
In the short term, leaders have to ensure organisation focus on increasing operational agility. The economy will take time to restart, can re-open partially and there could be several slow-downs and accelerations. Organizations need to become extremely agile in their operations to adjust to changing conditions and unknown customer behavior. They should concentrate on versatility (product, market, business models), leaner operations, upskilled workforce that can adapt to different roles, simplicity (in every aspect of the business) and vigilance to gather more data on markets and trends, capturing new opportunities. Cash flow and liquidity management remain key elements to have the capital to execute on the plan.
For the mid-term, the innovation cycle requires acceleration. Quick innovation and modular responses are more important than ever to find solutions to the increased pace of change in the environment. Taking example from agile and scrum approaches of the software industry, the innovation process can be shortened to propose solution for improving products, adopting new marketing strategies, increasing the efficiency of business processes and implementing organizational changes. Rapid prototyping can also be used for the strategic planning process in this mid-term phase.
For the long-term, leaders need to boost organisational resiliency. To achieve this, they must foster stronger ownership of the strategic plan by board, management and employees. Clarity of purpose is now core to the organisation success and a strong strategic framework will facilitates better and faster decisions and outcomes. They also need to favor wider diversity in board and management (age, gender, culture, digital, business background), looking for individuals with personality traits that support resilience: courage, ownership, curiosity, adaptability.
Finally, more focus on the stakeholder ecosystem is required to better connect the organisation to a wider range of stakeholders. Stronger stakeholder support helps build brand loyalty and promotes taking the right decisions to achieve financial and social returns. Stakeholder engagement will come in part from incorporating sustainable development objectives in company goals. Those companies that embrace sustainable development as one of their goals will experience quicker recovery. Here again a rapid prototyping approach makes sense. Start small in your environmental goals and show improvement to your stakeholders, iterating to get more and more aligned with ESG goals.
If there is one thing this crisis has shed light on, it is that we are one planet and that, to survive, we need to think sustainable development as consumers, business owners, politicians and citizens.
Two interesting references:
https://avieco.com/news-insights/7-ways-companies-can-benefit-from-integrating-sdgs/