From CBIA News, July/August 2001

Crafting your future

Will your business adapt to inevitable changes? Or find itself obsolete?

By Kathleen Stillman

Principal, Intelligent Technical Solutions LLC

Your future is out there. And it’s closer than you think.

The disruptive event, technology, product or service that will either cut you off at the knees or re-create your business may be on your doorstep. Will you recognize it? More important, will you be ready for it?

The future is going to happen to you, whether or not you are ready. You can’t control the future. The most you can do is influence how it affects you.

Crafting your future is about developing that influence, and it requires time and effort on a consistent basis. But you have to know what to influence and why — as well as how.

Identify the ‘what’ and ‘why’

A SWOT analysis (strengths/weaknesses/opportunities/threats) offers a simple yet effective means of identifying critical issues. The idea is to evaluate your business from a variety of viewpoints, including those of employees, suppliers, customers, wholesalers, retailers and any others who may play a role in your business activities. Consciously examine all assumptions and tacit beliefs about your business, your markets and your customers. 

The opportunity and threat components of SWOT will help you to prioritize your immediate strategies as well as to identify longer-term issues. It is important to consider real and potential threats. Changes in technologies, competitors, market channels, and the economic and regulatory environments could have significant effects on your business. When you can articulate a possibility, you can be more alert for the sometimes-tiny signals that something is changing and how such changes may affect you.

To conduct a SWOT analysis, ask a cross-section of informed observers from both inside and outside the company what they think are your business’s top five strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. You might want to add a fifth question: “If you were in charge, what are the first five things you would do?” Select participants who are knowledgeable about your business and whose opinions you respect. 

The SWOT can be conducted easily by sending a simple spreadsheet format via e-mail. You might want to have a third party ask the questions and assemble the results in order to provide anonymity for the respondents’ answers.

Where do you want to go?

Once you have completed the SWOT analysis, you are ready to begin crafting your future. This requires developing a vision of where you want to be some years from now. Articulate your vision as a set of meaningful and measurable goals, including key requirements. It’s not enough to say, for example, that you want to increase sales and profitability by 15% per year. You need to define the key means for achieving the goal. The opportunities identified in the SWOT analysis can help you decide on specific actions to pursue. Some of them may be operational: simplifying processes, aligning authority with accountability, empowering decision making. Some may be strategic: increasing market share, exploiting “fringe” markets, expanding your distribution channels.

At the end of this part of the process, you should be able to clearly articulate your plan, including specific goals and strategies to capitalize on your strengths, overcome the most critical weaknesses, exploit the most valuable opportunities, and mitigate the most serious threats.
All of this hard work will be expressed in a surprisingly brief document. And this will be a jubilant moment. Your people will be energized and raring to go. But you are not done yet.

How do you get there?

The most important part of crafting your future is creating an organization that can get you there. Your business is organized to do what you do today. Your systems, procedures and culture have evolved to support the status quo.

The new goals and strategies you have just defined will require you to examine your organizational structure. You may find that current alignments conflict with your goals. For your strategies to succeed, the structure must be aligned to support your plan. You may need to re-evaluate authority, accountability, reporting and departmental relationships, and compensation and incentive programs.

You can’t do it alone. Among your employees you need to find the natural leaders. They are the people to whom others gravitate. They are the informal advisers, mentors and coaches. They are communicators, collaborators and relationship builders. People trust them. They may not select themselves as leaders, but they will volunteer if you ask them. 

You will need one leader for each key initiative you want to undertake. Each leader will recruit a small team, perhaps three to six people, depending on the size of your company. Each team will have specific objectives and the authority to recommend and implement changes. 
This process may take several months, and its success depends on the team members’ ability to commit time and effort. It’s up to you to ensure that necessary arrangements are made so they can focus on their assigned tasks.

Success also depends on having the complete support and endorsement of senior management. This support should be clearly and frequently communicated. 
Now, you face the really hard part: You must trust your teams — and wait. This process is a lot like planting a garden. You do everything you can to create the optimum conditions for your garden to flourish. Now it’s nature’s turn. Be patient. It will grow.

Some weeks or months down the road, the organization will be different, perhaps subtly so. This is an evolutionary process and must be driven from within. There will be some turmoil. Traditions die hard. People resist change. Some people may not be willing or able to adapt to the changes. The problems will be obvious. The solutions should be humane.

Expect the unexpected

Crafting your future is like making a journey into uncharted territory. You start with a goal that you believe you can achieve. You make a plan to get there. You assemble the resources you think you may need. You try to anticipate the kinds of obstacles you may encounter and devise strategies to overcome them. And, you set out.

Along the way, expect the unexpected. You need to maintain a “weather watch,” constantly searching for external changes that can affect your plans. The moment you are certain about something, it will change. The strategy that you so carefully crafted could become obsolete in an instant. Your organization must be prepared to adapt continuously to changing circumstances.

Evolution must become an integral part of the company culture. Flexibility and responsiveness must become instinctive behaviors. Rapid adaptation will be the key to sustainable advantage in the future.

The industrial-age view of businesses as mechanisms is obsolete. Command and control structures are too rigid and slow. Today’s successful business is more like a biological entity, a community of interconnected systems that has an innate ability to respond rapidly and effectively to changing conditions. Your business must pursue behaviors that will enable it to thrive. In crafting your future, creating and sustaining a nourishing environment becomes a primary responsibility of management. 

To craft your future, think like an explorer; work like a gardener. 

Copyright 2001 Intelligent Technical Solutions LLC

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