Is your business ready to face the future, or are you at risk of becoming obsolete? Ensuring that your business is timeless is not a trivial exercise in the modern world, but it is incredibly important if you want to remain relevant in today’s turbulent era.
Why would I become obsolete?
The world is changing at an increasingly rapid pace
The world refuses to remain the same. Change is unyielding, and it’s shifting the way that businesses create value, interact with customers, and present their offerings.
New technologies are changing the operating landscape by introducing new capabilities for businesses to leverage. Concepts such as 3D printing, cloud applications and blockchain are redefining how businesses build their products. Platforms are being developed to fundamentally change the interactions between those who offer and those who need. The rise of marketplaces and sharing economy shows that there are shifts in how businesses and consumers can participate in the economy.
New cultural phenomena highlight the shifting mindsets of customers, and how their needs are changing with it. The influence of modern social media (think of TikTok) on how businesses engage with customers should not be overlooked. Online advertising through a handful of big tech companies has completely changed the marketing industry. New demands for sustainable, premium products have opened completely new markets for those who are able to meet it.
Businesses are also changing and redefining standards for consumers. New business models are providing levels of flexibility that were unheard of in years past. Subscription-models, freemium services, and customer-as-the-product are examples of new approaches to capturing value from business. These approaches are fuelled by liquid expectations from customers, desire for omnichannel communication, and hyper-personalisation of products.
The future is incredibly difficult to predict
Whilst these changes are easy to identify in hindsight, they can be incredibly difficult to predict. Systems are becoming more complex, especially as geographical barriers are becoming obsolete in our globalised, always-online world. This creates huge opportunity for change but makes the specific changes incredibly tough to accurately predict.
There are also black swan events with global impacts happening more frequently. These are events that are incredibly difficult to predict but have tremendous influence on the world. Events such as the global COVID-19 pandemic and associated national responses, recessions & global conflict events, local protests and political shifts, loadshedding, and many more are all considered black swans. These events create opportunity for disruptions, as the barriers to entry are constantly shifting and revenue-generating assets are more accessible. They also allow for new industries to emerge (such as decentralised finance, sharing economy, and renewable energy), which threaten to disrupt even the most protected niches of business.
How can I ensure success?
Future-proofing creates long-term business sustainability
The world is constantly changing, and in ways that are incredibly difficult to predict. As a business, it is easy to become complacent to these changes, and thus, become irrelevant in your market. To counter this, your business must become “Future-proof”. Being future-proof means that you are unlikely to become obsolete, and that you have a sustainable ability to create value. to do this, you need to balance resilience with flexibility.
Businesses need to be more flexible and adaptable
In the past, access to the tools of disruption were only available to a few powerful entities in the world. It required massive amounts of financial and political willpower to challenge established companies, and it took even longer to build a market big enough to make the incumbents feel any pressure. In today’s world, disruptors can grow to threaten your market within 2 years, thanks to new understanding and technologies that enable fast and efficient scaling of good ideas.
Resilience and robustness mean that your business can withstand short-term and low-impact changes. Short-lived trends need to be understood and appropriately responded to, as too much commitment to small changes will confuse and frustrate both your customers and your employees. On the other hand, you should be adaptive and flexible to valuable and long-lasting changes. You should be able to pivot to new customer needs and demands, otherwise your offering will become irrelevant. Knowing when to be resilient and when to be flexible is no trivial task but is vital to ensure that your business remains relevant.
There are specialist tools that can help you on your journey
Future-proofing your business can be achieved using just a few of the ideas in modern business management.
Innovation management is the structured approach to developing new products & services that will continue to delight your customers, regardless of how their needs and tastes change over time. It ensures that your customers are well-understood, that your design and prototyping process is efficient and co-created, and that your scaling, marketing and launch strategies are in-line with best practices for your industry.
Digital transformation is the utilisation of fourth industrial-revolution technologies that radically transform the way that business is conducted. Digital technologies are reshaping the relationships that are formed with customers, redefining operational efficiency and decision-making, and unlocking new business models to create and commercialise value.
Agile transformation is a modern set of practices that optimise the way you manage work and projects. By putting value creation at the core, Agile allows you to deliver more meaningful value to your customers sooner, without working your teams to death. When this is combined with remote work, gamification and new methods of collaboration, your business can continually focus on the most important aspects of your business.
Who can help us?
If you’ve made it this far into the post, you already know that there’s a shameless plug coming. Innovation Brewery is a management consulting company that specialises in the tools and techniques needed to future-proof your business. We can help with all stages of the modernisation process and offer support for any and all kinds of businesses, organisations, and departments. Let us know what issues are going unresolved in your business, and we will find ways to help you.
