The obscuring clouds of the old normal have been blown away by the Context Shock of Covid19 and that has revealed a simple truth: In the Chaotic-to-Complexity reality of the next two years, as my good friend Rory Yates put it, organisations that learn the most will win.
The route ahead will emerge from the weak signals of the unknown unknowns - the very things that what you think you know, will blind you to. You can never be an expert in the new. The only way you can get a handle on chaos (or seek to understand complexity) is to find ways to learn from it. Dave Snowden's probe-sense-respond in Complexity or act-sense-respond in Chaos, for example.As we learn we can reimagine our place in what we discover.
First apply some constraints - a framework in which to learn. The two essential constraints on a global scale are those defined by Doughnut Economics (follow that link for an interactive illustration) and activated in the UN's Sustainable Development Goals. The upper constraint is the planet's capability to support us and the lower constraint is minimum standards for humanity re rights, education, food, shelter etc. The space between (the ring of the Doughnut) is A Safe And Just Space For Humanity.
My own Planet Experience framework illustrates how this can be good for the planet, good for people and good for profit. In my view it is THE business superpower of the next 20 years.
Your North Star is therefore to learn as much as you can within the constraints of making a positive contribution to an economy which has, as its purpose, not growing GDP or y-o-y growth, but the creation of a Safe and Just Space for Humanity.
It's important in the conditions we face - of multiple unknowable outcomes - to acknowledge the decision makers role is now to be the steward of an ecological system rather than the operator of a machine. Decision makers must embark on that learning journey now.
There will be specific stocks and flows in the systems of your business which allow you to add energy or seek to dampen feedback loops towards unique and valuable contributions to the Safe And Just Space.
Applying these become your guide to how you organise, the kpis that matter most to you, how you plan, how you set targets and how you describe success. Because it's not just the amount you can learn, but how able you are to respond at pace to what you learn - how you act on the insight - that really matters.
This focus on learning was always valuable and a core part of the CX-led businesses that now dominate the planet. Amazon is not only brilliant at gathering insight, it is designed to learn from that insight. It's a learning organisation first.
Today - in a period of Context Shock, it is even more important to become a Learning First organisation - to make Learning your north star. This is not a time to make plans like you used to make plans. This is not a time to set targets like you used to set targets. This is not a time to describe success like you used to describe success. That way leads backwards.
To be a learning organisation is to make your journey towards The Responsive Organisation; Always learning from change and acting on it with rapid iterative, insight-led ways of working, lesson-seeking, value-focused people and the organisational antifragility to handle the no-normal ambiguity of the world we find ourselves in.
Further Reading:
- How To Respond To Context Shocks
- Learned Personal Antifragility
- Being Change - The Responsive Organisation Needs Responsive People
- The New Better of Work - The best of distributed teams and office life
- People Audits - When your people aren't coping
- Urgent Digital Transformation
- Accelerated Trend to Automation
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