Hi, my name’s Tom Cheesewright
and I’m an applied futurist.
I work with organisations around the world
Telling them to see what’s next
and build their response, with innovation and agility.
Today I want to talk to you about the future ready organisation
Why now is the time to start to build for the future.
Build athletic organisations that are agile and ready.
So many of us in our organisations throughout this pandemic
have just been reacting, responding to the challenge,
changing our infrastructure, our processes, our skills,
to try and keep things going, to survive
We need to break out of that moment, we need to take a choice now
to think about what’s next
To build something different so it can go beyond surviving and thrive.
Today I’m going to talk to you about how to build an athletic organisation
with three top tips to change your organisation
to be ready for the future.
Take that choice today.
We're working in an age of high-frequency change.
It's a new way. Something different is happening,
and we need to think differently, act differently, as a result.
For the last 50 years, business has been about optimisation,
about efficiency,
about how can we do better tomorrow what we did yesterday,
where better typically means doing the same things
but for less, or for greater profit.
It’s a successful strategy.
It's been the foundation of so many of our greatest organisations,
our big success stories,
but it's limited.
It doesn't work so well
in an age where tomorrow what your customer wants
might be something completely different
to what they wanted yesterday.
It doesn't work so well
when the operating environment can change at a moment’s notice.
It doesn't work so well in this age of high frequency change.
And that's the first thing we have to get to grips with.
All those things we learned about how to run business,
how to maximise success and growth,
all those lessons about optimisation are no longer current.
We've got to relearn some things.
And there's a foundational reason for that.
Something that has changed our age,
something that has disrupted our patterns,
that's changed business forever.
And it was happening before the pandemic.
And it's down to technology.
Technology has taken the friction out of our markets.
Technology has accelerated our capabilities for innovation.
It's empowered our creativity.
It's allowed us to bring new things to market so much faster.
The result is that things get disrupted now,
what worked yesterday, may not work tomorrow.
Customers are constantly being exposed to new things and new ideas,
and all of us have to keep up.
The next few years are going to see even more change and innovation.
We're on the cusp of massive impacts of new technologies,
5G, AI, IOT.
These things are going to turn more markets upside down.
The robots we're starting to see on the streets today are just the beginning
of the robots in our workplace of tomorrow.
I talk about now as this moment of choice,
why we have to choose to make a change now
because it's so hard sometimes to get out of that period of panic.
When the pandemic hit,
actually most organisations did a phenomenal job.
We can all be quite proud of ourselves
at how we've reacted in business,
the speed at which we transformed
the speed at which we equipped people with the skills
and the technology and the connectivity to keep working,
to keep going.
And if you're here now, if your business is here now, you have survived.
You've done an amazing job,
but we can only keep going in that period of reactivity for so long.
For me, one of the best illustrations of the process
we've been through, is Virginia Satir's change model.
Originally created for family therapy, it's been adopted into the corporate world
because it's such a useful illustration of what happens after that moment of impact,
as we've had with the pandemic,
where we're on this path of progress, and then
things get turned upside down
and we spend this period surviving, reacting,
trying to keep going
until we get to that moment where we can take a choice,
and design something different and better for the future.
I believe that's the moment we're in now.
It's time to make that choice.
But what do we do? What's next? What do we build?
What do our organisations look like?
What are we designing for?
The best way I can explain this,
the best way I can tell you, what I do for my clients,
is to give you an analogy,
the future ready organisation,
the organisations we need to build for tomorrow, for me,
have the characteristics of great athletes.
Three characteristics in particular, three characteristics that separate
the rest of us from the truly great athletes.
Their form. They get in shape.
They have the physique for the game they're playing,
and that physique changes over time.
They're in shape for the game they play today.
Their senses, they're acute, they're sharp.
They pull in information
from across the game to see what's next
and their decision-making ability
with all that information, they take decisions fast.
And if we can do those three things, we can build
athletic, agile organisations
that are fit for the future.
Let me break those three things down in more detail.
Start with that shape.
What shape do our organisations need to be in to be athletic today?
Well, it's not the shape we had to be in 20 years ago.
20 years ago, when our organisations were built to be optimal,
when they were super lean, super focused, tightly integrated,
really efficient at doing what they did,
those organisations fail
when the world gets turned upside down.
They can't react fast
because they're so focused on doing what they did efficiently.
What we need instead is organisations that are adaptable,
organisations that are designed to be resilient and flexible and innovative.
And we need to code that capability
right into the DNA of the organisation, in its structure.
Future-ready organisations
don't look like these tightly integrated monoliths.
They look like networks,
networks of functions that can be dynamically recombined to meet new challenges,
functions from inside the organisation, functions from outside,
that come together like building blocks to build new things.
And one organisation perhaps exemplifies this
one organisation's success in many ways can be put down to recognising this fact early.
Back in the early 2000’s,
the chief executive of Amazon famously sent out a memo to all the people in the organisation and said,
stop talking to each other.
We don't want to be a tight
lean organisation like the ones of the past.
We want to be a network.
I want to wrap every function of our organisation in a layer of software
that allows us to plug and play, to pull it apart and rebuild it to build new things.
I want every function of our organisation to be
in conversation with the customer,
to be able to dive in,
see what it does and use those capabilities for themselves.
I want to be able to pull it off the shelf and use it.
And they wrapped a function of their organisation
now called Amazon Web Services.
in this layer of software that allowed it to say to the world,
Hey, this is what I do,
this is what I can do for you,
and plug me into your business,
building one of the largest cloud hosting companies in the world
and the driver of Amazon’s profits for many years.
Amazon’s success is in large part because
it has this resilient, flexible, networked structure
and more and more organisations are going down that route now.
They're looking at their structure and saying, actually,
I don't want to be tight and focused on this one thing that we do today.
I want this sort of set of building blocks that I can
assemble to meet new challenges tomorrow.
And that is the structure we have to build for all our organisations
if we want to build this agility, this adaptability for the future.
Networks of components, not monoliths focused on a single goal.
The next trait we have to develop in our organisation
is enhanced senses.
Our organisations need to be able to look to the future,
need to be able to see what's coming, just like the greatest athletes do.
Just think about the greatest footballers.
The best ones aren't the ones with the best ball control,
looking at their feet,
they're the ones who can get their heads up
and look ahead and read the game and see what's coming first.
Make that 40 yard pass out the winger before he even starts to run.
And that's what we need to be able to do.
Now it's hard.
We're so busy. We're so focused on today
that to get your head up and out of that and look to the future is difficult.
But this is my challenge to you.
Can you carve out 1% of your time to focus on the future?
One day every six months that translates to.
One day every six months
where you are focused on what's next, not what's now,
and do so in a structured way.
The way I do this is really simple. It's just about asking two questions.
Start by speaking to your colleagues and your customers and your partners
and ask them this. What frustrates you?
What winds you up?
What stops you being as productive as you could be?
You'll get a load of answers because it's cathartic.
People like to get these things off their chests.
You'll learn a lot.
And what you’ll find are what I call pressure points.
The cracks that exist in your organisation,
these cracks where the greatest change is going to come.
Now put that to one side,
put your pressure points to one side
and go and ask a different question.
Go and look at the organisations that are making the greatest change in the world.
Go and look at the industries that are adjacent to yours but maybe not quite the same,
go and pick up the pitch deck from the hottest start-up
or the annual report from the most successful businesses,
go and read the business pages, but really read them and look for trends.
It could be in technology in AI and 5G, automation.
It could be in the economy or behavioural culture.
But what you want to see is what's coming, what's next.
Now go back to your pressure points
and compare those incoming trends with those existing pressure points
and look at how one is going to influence the other.
If you're already struggling to meet customer demands,
how are you going to keep up
when that demand accelerates?
When they expect an even more frictionless experience?
If you're already struggling under the burden of administration,
could AI help?
These intersections between the incoming trends, the existing pressure points,
where the greatest change will come.
Now you may end up with a big list, but I want you to filter,
focus it down to five, by asking this simple question
of every one of those intersections,
could it turn my business upside down?
Is this is an existential threat or opportunity?
Only focus on those, which the answer to that question, is yes.
Get yourself a list of five.
Deal with those issues over the subsequent six months.
And repeat the process over again.
The last of these three athletic traits that we need our organisations to develop
is the ability to take decisions fast.
It's no good seeing what's coming if you can't move out of the way
or step into capture that opportunity.
Now there's lots of different ways to do this
and most organisations have looked at data,
big data, data lakes,
data analytics.
How can we bring in more information?
How can we accelerate the flow of that information through the organisation?
How can we present that information better
in a way that compels people to act?
Things are all incredibly valuable things
they're worth investing in,
but there's something else you can do
that's almost certainly harder,
but almost certainly more effective as well.
Because right now we're in a culture of centralisation,
so many of our big decisions are just pushed up,
and up, and up the chain,
to the people at the centre of the organisation.
And only they make those big decisions.
And the result is that those decisions are slow.
They have to move through multiple people.
Those people at the centre are overloaded.
They cannot take decisions at enough of a rate
to make the organisation agile.
So we've got to distribute that power.
We're going to start to push that power out towards the edges of the organisation.
We've got to delegate. We've got to give people at the edges of the organisation,
these broader capabilities, autonomy and responsibility.
Give them the chance to act, the capability to act.
If you push power to the edges of the organisation
so that the people that can respond to what's coming in.
You don't need to waste time with that information flowing through the organisation.
You don't need to wait on those people at the centre to take those decisions.
It's incredibly, incredibly powerful.
And you look at the organisations that have thrived through this crisis.
They've been the ones that took decisions fast,
the ones that maybe didn't have any better foresight than the rest of us
but saw the opportunity early
and acted radically to take advantage.
You look at the, the restaurants around the corner from here where I am now
a Michelin starred restaurant, who recognised
they weren't going to have any people in the door anytime soon.
So started doing super high-quality meal boxes
delivered to your door.
Look at the grocery delivery companies in France and Germany like Lupe,
who saw this opportunity.
People are going to need this and ramped up their capabilities
to fulfil that need.
Around the world, organisations
saw the threat, but also saw the opportunity,
and the ones we're talking about now,
the ones we've become passionate about
during this pandemic, are the ones who acted fast.
Now's the time to make a change.
Now is the time to choose to build for the future.
We spent a long time reacting. We need to stop doing that.
We need to get proactive and start to build
and design future ready organisations
if we're going to go beyond surviving and thrive.
For me,
the best analogy, the best description for those organisations,
those future ready businesses,
is that they are athletic.
They have these three traits.
First of all, think about the shape of our organisation.
Do we want to be a tightly focused monolith,
only optimized to do one thing?
Or do we want to be a creative, collaborative network
of components, partners, units, functions,
that can be dynamically reassembled to meet new challenges,
that can bring in new skills and capabilities as required
because we're open and open-minded?
They have sharpened senses.
They are acute to the markets,
to customers and to the trends that are coming
that are going to turn our worlds upside down
and they take decisions fast,
based on the information that they see.
Our worlds have already changed.
Our worlds were changing due to high frequency change
back before the pandemic,
and through the pandemic,
so much of the change that was coming has been accelerated.
Hybrid work was coming.
It’s here now.
All this shift to increasingly digital interaction was coming.
It’s here now.
Automation, robot delivery,
used by the likes of Co-Op in the UK and elsewhere
is here now.
So the question is what's next?
You’ve got to take that decision and build for the future
because success in the future is going to be all about
resilience, all about innovation,
and those things come when we come together
when we get together around a table,
with a piece of paper,
and communicate and share ideas,
when we can collaborate and build new things.
The next few years are going to see continuing advances in those technologies
that have stripped friction from our world
and created this age of high-frequency change.
In 10 years’ time, we're probably going to spend
10 hours a day in mixed reality,
living in a world where the digital is permanently overlaid in the physical.
Where photorealistic people interact with us as if they were there,
but I can tell you now, even in 10 years,
it won't be quite like they are there.
The bandwidth of being there together is unbeatable,
and we have to create the spaces and the opportunities
and give people the tools to come together in creativity.
Only then can we build these truly athletic organisations
that are fit for the future.
Thank you for watching.
I hope you found my three top tips on how to build an athletic organisation useful.
For information about how Canon can help you make the right choices now for your digital transformation journey,
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