Last month, I attended the first event of Liquid’s Future Led series on the future of the world and how it impacts us as an organisation. An hour of deep conversation was not enough for our first topic – capitalism crisis. The initiative itself is significant, however, because it underlies one of our attempts to prepare and stay ready for what lies ahead.
Future Led is an internal series of discussions where together with a panel of speakers and experts, we examine, envision, and explore the trends of the future. Every two months, we take a step back from immediate client problems and look more broadly beyond our horizon. During these events, we touch on impactful and potentially disruptive topics, including Capitalism, Artificial Intelligence, Sustainability, Altruism and Government. We talk about how these affect us individually and as an organisation, as well as how best to prepare for them.
Well before COVID-19, organisations were talking about modifying and adapting for a new world, and the need for changes has always been there. Now, the pandemic has made those needs only more pressing.
The case for change is evident. Businesses that stay agile and adaptable during the pandemic see opportunities and are taking advantage of them, while those slower to change struggle to survive. The pace of change has never been so rapid in so many aspects, and the critical factor is that organisations do not have much time to waste. What we should ask now is no longer if we should change, but how.
How should we prepare ourselves for new challenges and uncertainties that the future brings? What actions should we take today to be ready for them?
A future-ready organisation requires a future-oriented mindset. Therefore, now is the time to have conversations about the future – what the world looks like in the coming decades.
My short answer is it absolutely does.
Making sense of the future is at the core of every business’ strategic planning. Understanding what lies ahead allows us to form new visions and map out the paths toward them.
Thinking about the future this way prompts us to re-examine our identity, purpose, how we operate and create value, and how we will grow. Consequently, a renewed sense of who we are, clarity around how we work and grow, will improve our chance of staying ahead of the new normal.
We also need to talk about the future because as an organisation we need a long-term, ecosystem mindset. When we think long term and systematically, we can make different trade-offs and decisions, which are measured not by short-term benefits but by their added value far down the road.
With these forces come difficult questions that we should ask ourselves:
Finding the definite answers to these questions might take weeks, if not months. And it might very well be that we will never find an answer to some of them. But this is not the point. What matters is that these questions prompt us to rethink our current way of working, our purpose and value, and our plans going ahead. If in doing so we gain some clarity and direction, then it is all worth the effort.
For the first Future Led event, we talked about the future of capitalism and what we, as a business, can do. With Liquid’s CX Director and event moderator, Fiona Armstrong, we sought the diverse views and perspectives of three panellists:
Left to right: Richard Slatter (on screen), Yas Grigaliunas, Jason Titman, Fiona Armstrong.
I left the event with more questions than answers, which is what these conversations are meant to do. To encapsulate a topic as complex as capitalism in an hour is impossible, but I believe we touched on very key points:
Of course, exploring the trends is only the first step. What’s left for us to do is to make sense of them, how we’re placed in all this, and how to go ahead.