Earlier this week, I was speaking with the CEO of an organisation facing the very real possibility of closure.
As we discussed what had brought the organisation to this point, the CEO identified two existential threats: technology and legislation.
Neither was new.
Both had been known, discussed and documented for many years—possibly decades.
That was what alarmed me most.
The organisation had not been struck by an unexpected event that nobody could reasonably have foreseen. The world had been changing around it for a very long time. What had not changed sufficiently was the organisation itself.
It would be easy to say that technology or legislation had pulled the rug out from under the business.
But the rug had not been pulled suddenly.
It had been moving, centimetre by centimetre, for years.
The threat is not always the change
External forces can undoubtedly threaten the survival of a business. Leaders cannot control technological development, new legislation, economic conditions, changing customer behaviour or the arrival of new competitors.
But the external change is not always the whole explanation for an organisation’s decline.
Sometimes the greater threat is the organisation’s failure to respond to a change it can already see.
The technology may have been emerging for years.
The legislation may have been moving slowly through consultation, debate and implementation.
Customers may have been gradually changing their expectations.
Competitors may have been experimenting with different business models.
The signals were present. But recognising that something is happening is not the same as confronting what it could mean for your organisation.
A business can know about a change without truly anticipating it.
When the urgent consumes the important
Most businesses do not consciously choose to ignore the future.
They become consumed by the present.
Customers need attention. Staff need leadership. Suppliers must be paid. Problems must be resolved. Revenue targets must be reached. The pressures of today are immediate, visible and often unforgiving.
By comparison, preparing for a future threat can feel less urgent.
The consequences may still be several years away. The existing business model may still be generating revenue. Customers may still be arriving. The organisation may still appear stable.
Leaders reassure themselves that there is time.
The difficult decisions are postponed until the next strategy session, the next financial year or the next leadership meeting.
Then one day the consequences are no longer distant.
Revenue has declined. Costs can no longer be absorbed. Capabilities are outdated. The skills required for the future are missing. Competitors have moved ahead. The organisation’s available options have narrowed.
What could once have been managed through thoughtful reinvention must now be addressed through emergency intervention.
The important has finally become urgent—but possibly too late.
Strategy cannot only be an annual event
This does not mean organisations should abandon annual strategic planning.
It means that strategy cannot live only in an annual planning session.
A leadership team cannot look outward once a year, agree on a plan and then spend the next 12 months looking predominantly inward. The environment continues to change after the strategy document has been approved.
Strategic awareness must therefore become part of the ongoing rhythm of leadership.
Recent Deloitte research found that 67% of leaders believe their primary competitive advantage over the next three years will come from being fast and nimble, while only 28% believe scale will be their main differentiator. Yet although 88% regarded the ability to dynamically organise people, skills and resources as extremely or very important, only 7% believed their organisations were making significant progress in doing so.
The gap is not necessarily a lack of awareness.
Many leaders already know adaptability matters.
The gap is between recognising the need to adapt and building an organisation capable of doing it.
Every organisation has a reinvention rhythm
In workshops presented by reinvention strategist Dr Nadya Zhexembayeva, I have heard her share research indicating that the required cycle of business reinvention varies significantly by industry—from approximately six years in some sectors to as little as 18 months in others.
This does not mean that an entire business must be dismantled and rebuilt every 18 months.
It does mean that leaders need to understand the reinvention rhythm of their particular industry.
How long can the current business model reasonably remain relevant?
How quickly is technology changing how value is created and delivered?
What changes are taking place in regulation, customer expectations, skills, distribution or competition?
Which parts of the organisation are becoming less effective, even though they may still appear to be working?
An organisation operating in an 18-month reinvention environment cannot afford to revisit its deepest assumptions only once every three or five years.
Even an organisation in a slower-moving industry cannot assume that what worked historically will continue working indefinitely.
Anticipate. Design. Implement.
The foundational elements of reinvention process can be understood through three interconnected disciplines:
Anticipate
Leadership (and ideally the rest of the organisation) must intentionally look beyond the daily operations of the business.
This involves watching for changes in technology, regulation, customer behaviour, social expectations, economic conditions and competition—and then asking what those changes could mean for the organisation.
Anticipation is not about predicting the future perfectly.
It is about noticing what is already changing and being willing to confront its possible implications.
Design
Once a meaningful threat or opportunity has been identified, the organisation must design a appropriate responses, being weary of placing all their eggs in one basket.
This may involve changing the business model, developing new capabilities, investing in technology, reskilling employees, entering different markets, changing how value is delivered or deciding what the organisation must stop doing.
Awareness without design produces concern, but not movement.
Implement
A well-designed response still creates no value until it is implemented.
Resources must be committed. Responsibilities must be clear. Decisions must be made. Experiments must be run. Progress must be reviewed, discard what is not working and progress what is – the organisation must be willing to adjust as it learns.
Implementation is where reinvention stops being an interesting leadership conversation and becomes organisational reality.
This closely reflects what strategy scholar David Teece describes as the capabilities to sense changes, seize opportunities and transform the organisation. These activities must happen continuously or semi-continuously as customers, competitors and technologies change.
Creating space before the crisis
Leaders cannot give meaningful attention to the future when every available moment is consumed by operational pressure.
Time for anticipation must be deliberately protected.
Leadership teams need regular space to lift their heads, look beyond current performance and ask uncomfortable questions:
What changes in our environment are we aware of but have not properly responded to?
Which assumptions about our organisation or industry may no longer be reliable?
What could make our current business model significantly less relevant?
What are we postponing because the consequences have not yet become painful enough?
What should we begin testing now, while we still have the resources and freedom to experiment?
These conversations may not produce the same immediate sense of achievement as solving today’s operational problem.
But they may prevent tomorrow’s existential crisis.
While choices still exist
I have compassion for any CEO carrying the possibility that an organisation—and the livelihoods connected to it—may not survive.
Leadership in those circumstances is extraordinarily difficult.
This is not about standing outside the situation and assigning blame. Decisions are made within complex systems, often under pressure and with limited resources. Leaders may also inherit years of postponed decisions and deeply embedded organisational habits.
But compassion should not prevent us from learning from what happened.
Businesses are not always destroyed by changes they could never have anticipated.
Sometimes they decline because the organisation remained focused on operating yesterday’s model while the foundations beneath it were slowly changing.
The time to reinvent is not when every other option has disappeared.
It is while the organisation still has customers, resources, credibility and choices.
Because the rug is rarely pulled out in one sudden movement.
More often, it shifts slowly beneath our feet—and the greatest danger is becoming so accustomed to the movement that we stop noticing it.
As a trained Reinvention Practitioner, I work with leaders and leadership teams to anticipate what is changing, design an appropriate response, and turn that response into action—before circumstances remove their ability to choose.
If this article has raised an uncomfortable question about your own organisation, perhaps now is the time to begin the conversation, while you still have customers, resources, credibility and choices.