"Survival of the Adaptest"
Ya, I know it's not a word but I like the way it sounds. :)
I've recently completed a Connected Business Assessment for a large energy company. I was quite impressed with their strategic focus; with where they are taking the company. One of the key insights to take away from the work we did together was how important organisational agility will be in the coming years. The results inferred that without being able to ramp-up, ramp-down and re-tool the company's employees in a timely, efficient manner they won't be able to achieve successful delivery of the new products and associated service that has been recognised as the catalyst for their future existence.
With the rapid change we experience in our day and age, this organisational agility I speak of is an attribute that differentiates; it's the difference between leading and following. To be a leader in your industry means you must manoeuvre quicker than your competitors. The need to be agile was an insight yes, but not the biggest one we had. That title was awarded to our understanding that the answer to building organisational agility was not going to come from rolling out new policies, standard operating procedures or performance measures. Instead, it was going to come from tapping the expertise and knowledge from individuals and distributing it to everyone else in such a way that the transference of worker wherewithal and experience becomes a natural part of people's day to day working activity.
Vision: In a "Connected Business" workers are enabled with advanced collaboration methods, they are able leverage one another's knowledge and expertise naturally through social media tools and information repositories and innovation is engrained within their culture; Collaboration, Leveraging Knowledge and Innovation - 3 key ingredients contributing to modern day organisational agility.
Kevin Cashman, author of Leadership from the inside out , says the old school adage "survival of the fittest" is becoming obsolete when referring to competition in business. "The whole idea of 'fittest' needs to be redefined. [Competitive superiority] needs to be re-thought in terms of survival of the most aware, or survival of the most flexible".
I wholeheartedly agree with Kevin. I think those most adept at adapting are the companies of the future.
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Ah, the neologist (to coin a phrase)! Adaptist, indeed. Your observation, the change was going to be enabled when the company was able to "tap the expertise and knowledge from individuals and distributing it to everyone else in such a way that the transference of worker wherewithal and experience becomes a natural part of people's day to day working activity" sounds a lot like crowd sourcing. In a recent post on A List Apart - a blog for web designers, mainly - Derek Powazek summarizes the concept of "The Wisdom of Crowds" (a phenomenon famous described by Surowiecki in the book by the same name). Surowieki argues that we get better results when we are able to tap into the latent knowledge of large groups of people acting in their own best interest. The key is extracting that knowledge without too much effort or disrupting the system. This is where information technology comes in, as it can lower the barriers to gathering, analyzing, and reporting that "wisdom" in a timely fashion. For a growing number of companies this means developing, enhancing, and refining the feedback loops that may or may not already exist. As Powazek makes clear, these systems need constant care since you are working with a dynamic system - so the wisdom of crowds can't always be found in the same place, the same way, every time. More here: http://www.alistapart.com/articles/the-wisdom-of-community/
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