Plans and Punches
Mike Tyson famously said once, “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth”. How wise and true this is in business. Competitive markets change, pandemics hit, riots erupt, people move – and all are powerful disruptive forces toward a company’s ability to execute. Disruption then is change’s menacing pet, and they often walk together.
The beginning of each year is often marked by planning retreats for corporate leadership teams. It is in these that budgets are set, goals are identified, and plans are made for the upcoming year. Long term plans from previous years are assessed and measured against achievement. The hope is for a deep introspection in the health of the company, and to emerge with clear vision.
So, what does corporate leadership do with the feral beast called “disruption”? Well, don’t run. That never works.
The first step is to create a sustainable culture within the leadership team. This requires, flexibility in opinion, honest introspection, integrity, willingness and acceptance between team members. Acknowledge your bias as many organizations also weight external factors and their impact on corporate resiliency too highly. This is in part due to natural biases that people have and influence from their personal worldviews. New AI systems that are 'self-aware' have built-in automatic detection and mitigation facilities to avoid undesirable behavior, cognitive bias and inaccurate decision making.
The second step is to engineer a sales and marketing culture that can not only absorb market changes but learn quickly and grow from them. This requires leadership to pivot their go-to-market strategies to focus on core value maximization and adjacency markets; and to invest strategically in enablement capacity, and to bolster morale with modern analytics and AI tools that enable buyers.
Third, leadership team that develop transparent data-driven feedback loops between itself, it’s staff, it’s customers and the external market, gain valuable and timely insights into the health of its strategic plan (from the start of the year). Data driven feedback loops are vital toward avoiding roadblocks, repairing errors and creating new ideas. This requires a modern data architecture (MDM and datalakes as a foundation) that can leverage AI algorithms that can readily assess both internal and external data sets. These models can the transparently present the facts to the business, reducing the risk of human-bias.
Resiliency depends on keeping perspective when crisis arises and understanding that controlling internal factors in your organizations is more important than agonizing over uncontrollable external factors. Having a strong foundation in machine learning and deep learning along with the right SW architecture to enable AI are the prerequisites for building insights that enable leadership resiliency for tomorrows recovery and economic rebound.