You cannot prosper by using irresistible forces without the right skills. This article looks at what scenarios can help you identify the right skills to develop and protect.
The following approaches can help you pinpoint your enterprise's strengths and weaknesses regarding the skills you need to succeed in surpassing the future best practice and approaching the ideal best practice for locating, anticipating, and adapting to changing irresistible forces.
Create Scenarios to Reveal Your Level of Capability
Most businesses can address three or four scenarios successfully at the same time. In testing for skills, these scenarios can give you a dry run on the kind of actual changes you may face in the future.
Using the scenarios will help reveal the strengths and weaknesses of your current skills and experience. Here are some ideas for scenarios that will test these factors for you:
What scenario can you investigate that will be the most challenging for your group to adapt to?
Think of this approach as a variation on the Nth-degree test (looking at extreme forms of irresistible forces). Try to identify the most difficult aspects of organizational resistance to change, a particularly knotty irresistible force.
What scenario can you study that will create the most potential confusion in implementing a new direction?
Many companies unknowingly select strategies that depend on a certain business environment, such as the growth of one channel of distribution at the expense of another. Should these trends reverse for any reason, a lot of organizational thinking quickly becomes irrelevant.
For instance, the old guidelines for one part of the market may be a disaster for the other market segment. Value-added computer resellers need a high selling price on their equipment to make a decent profit. Direct sellers of computers need a low selling price to offset their lower value-added. If you suddenly choose to compete in both channels, how do you price your computers and be successful in both channels? What scenario can you examine that will be most dangerous to your organization's viability?
Imagining such scenarios is helpful for focusing people's minds on survival, something that they usually care about. In that context, concerns will be more realistic about where to make changes in skill levels and incentives. Such a scenario could be one whereby your company's reputation was harmed in some fundamental way such that customers were inclined to shun your products and services.
What scenario would cost you the largest number of your critically skilled people?
Many firms suddenly collapse because of the loss of one or two people. Creating a scenario that causes widespread loss of skills helps focus attention on the need to back up those skills in other people, and what may be currently lacking in the learning environment. For many companies such a situation could be triggered by a continuing collapse of your own stock price while the stocks of competitors stayed high. Highly capable executives and technical people would see that they could earn vastly more money from the same efforts elsewhere.
Copyright 2008 Donald W. Mitchell, All Rights Reserved
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