By Stephen DeAngelis
Author and keynote speaker Rishad Tobaccowala asserts that “there are four questions that most companies and individuals seek answers to.”[1] Those questions are: 1) How can you and your team manage new challenges? (Change Management); 2) What’s coming up tomorrow, next year and beyond? (Understanding the Future); 3) How do you remain authoritative in today’s landscape? (Modern Leadership); and, 4) How does one grow/remain relevant? (Purposeful Growth). All of those questions, in some way or another, deal with the how companies need to adapt to the ever-shifting business landscape. Change makes life difficult for leaders. Or as Tobaccowala states, “Change is inevitable. Yet every company struggles with embracing new ideas and finding ways to grow. … But irrelevance is even worse.” Of course, Tobaccowala isn’t the first person to recognize that change leadership is difficult. Centuries ago, Niccolò Machiavelli, in his classic The Prince, wrote, “There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things, because the innovator has for enemies all those who have done well under the old conditions, and lukewarm defenders in those who may do well under the new.”
How can you and your team manage new challenges?
McKinsey & Company partners, Dominic Skerritt and John Parsons, insist that any company who wants to establish lasting performance improvements that establish a competitive advantage need to create a communal sense of “will” among its employees.[2] They explain, “For a company undergoing transformation, cultivating employee ‘will’ to change the way it operates is critical for success. Organizations that focus on generating this will, along with building critical skills, executing with rigor, and setting a holistic aspiration, are far more likely to outperform peers.” As Machiavelli noted so many centuries ago, cultivating the will to change is far from easy. Skerritt and Parsons suggest that embracing the three Es of change — elevate, empower, energize — will greatly improve a company’s changes of success.
They explain, “Leaders can take three critical steps to get more employees involved and committed to the transformation. First, elevate a core segment of employees to take responsibility for designing and implementing change. Next, build on this strong foundation by empowering a broader group of influencers and managers to amplify transformation-related activities. Finally, make sure transformation sponsors play a critical role in energizing all employees about the change.” They conclude, “A workforce that is engaged in the transformation goals and supported by its leaders is ready for whatever opportunities lie ahead.”
What’s coming up tomorrow, next year, and beyond?
Anyone who believes they can accurately predict the future is probably deluded. Fortunately, there are trendlines that provide clues to how things might unfold. Understanding those trendlines, and exploring possible deviations, is an important activity for any company. Tobaccowala notes, “The challenge for most of us to realize is that future will not fit the patterns of the past.”[3] What’s important for a company to identify is what variations will have the greatest impact on its business. Artificial intelligence (AI) solutions can help companies explore numerous potential scenarios. For example, Enterra Business WarGaming™ enables organizations to leverage their data to make strategic decisions by anticipating the moves of their competitors and taking direct action to beat the competition, mitigate risk, navigate uncertainty, and maximize market opportunity. Part of Enterra Business WarGaming is the Enterra Global Insights and Decision Superiority System™ (EGIDS™) — powered by the Enterra Autonomous Decision Science™ platform — which can help business leaders rapidly explore a multitude of options and scenarios.
How do you remain authoritative in today’s landscape?
Tobaccowala observes, “Leaders are being tested like never before.”[4] Author and speaker Thomas Erl agrees that the new business landscape requires a new kind of leadership. Erl specifically discusses challenges associated with digital transformation. He explains, “A digital transformation is usually an organization-wide initiative that advocates the use of a specific set of contemporary technologies in support of improving an organization’s productivity and market growth, as well as its ability to maintain positive, long-lasting customer relations. What makes a digital transformation so compelling is how it establishes an environment that blends data science with automation to produce ‘data intelligence’ — genuinely insightful information that helps reveal to organizations how they can improve what they are already doing, and how they can grow by introducing new lines of business into new markets.”[5]
Digital transformation is too often focused strictly on technology. However, self-described Tech Ethnographer & Sociologist, Tricia Wang, insists that digital transformation at its best involves “a total paradigm shift in the culture and operations — it’s not just about buying the latest digital tool, but about creating a new system, new cadence, new mindset.”[6] Creating “a new system” requires a new kind of leadership. Erl explains, “Business leaders can no longer rely on traditional roles because those roles were defined for a relationship between business and technology that exists differently under a digital transformation. With the introduction of past business and technology innovations, the roles of business leaders have often needed to be redefined and sometimes supplemented by adding new roles. With digital transformation, the scope of business leaders’ roles needs to generally be broadened in order for the leadership team to continue to function successfully.”
How does one grow/remain relevant?
When Tobaccowala asked this question, he was primarily thinking about personal growth. Nevertheless, the question is also important to ask about a company’s growth and relevance. McKinsey senior partners, Homayoun Hatami, Dana Maor, and Patrick Simon, write, “We have entered a new era. Call it the age of perpetual organizational upheaval. It demands new approaches to organizational management to replace models designed for a less complex, less unstable bygone age. In other words, it’s time for organizations to step up from structure and streamlined processes to more dynamic, flexible, and intuitive approaches.”[7]
To help companies remain relevant and grow, Enterra Solutions® has developed the Enterra System of Intelligence®. This System ushers in a new era of AI-enabled management science by merging cutting-edge analytical techniques with a business’ data and knowledge to Sense, Think, Act, and Learn® on enterprise data to meet the changing needs of the market. Enterra’s System acts as central “brain” within an organization, ingesting diverse datasets, business logic and practices, and strategy, to uncover unique insights and generate autonomous recommendations across the enterprise at market speed. Insights and recommendations generated by the Enterra System of Intelligence are acted upon through deep integrations with an organization’s established systems of record and engagement, akin to how the brain (decision-making) and central nervous system (actions) interact within the human body. Enterra’s system uniquely learns the environmental reasons that recommendations are successful or not and persists that learning in its Ontologies and Generative AI knowledge bases to improve future insights and recommendations.
Concluding Thoughts
Louise K. Allen, Chief Product Officer at Planview, observes, “Facilitating change is the single most important skill you need to thrive in product management. It requires a deep understanding of several fundamental disciplines: digital product mapping, evolving end-user needs, strategic planning, cross-functional collaboration, data-driven measuring, and continual refinement. This allows you to serve as a bridge of influence that establishes continuity between your organization’s technology offerings, customer experiences, and business objectives.”[8] Artificial intelligence solutions are not only a part of the transition process they can effectively help leaders with change management. Allen concludes, “Executing digital transformations at scale is never easy. But with proactive approaches, strong product managers, and a product-oriented mindset in place, your organization won’t be bound for failure.”
Footnotes
[1] Rishad Tobaccowala, “The Four Questions: How to Navigate, Not Avoid, Change,” Adweek, 3 August 2021.
[2] Dominic Skerritt and John Parsons, with Mary Lass Stewart, Matt Schrimper, and Nicolette Rainone, “Going all in: Why employee ‘will’ can make or break transformations,” McKinsey & Company, 6 September 2024.
[3] Rishad Tobaccowala, “The 4 Questions Part II: What Will the Future Be Like?” Adweek, 13 August 2021.
[4] Rishad Tobaccowala, “The 4 Questions Part III: How Leaders Can Rise to Today’s Challenges,” Adweek, 20 August 2021.
[5] Thomas Erl, “Digital Transformation Requires a New Kind of Leadership,” CEO World, 28 February 2022.
[6] Trevor Miles, “Let’s be clear: Digitization is not the same as Digital Transformation,” Kinaxis Blog, 8 December 2017.
[7] Homayoun Hatami, Dana Maor, and Patrick Simon, “All change: The new era of perpetual organizational upheaval,” McKinsey & Company, 15 June 2023.
[8] Louise K. Allen, “Effective Change Management Is Key to a Successful Digital Transformation,” Inc., 9 May 2024.
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