Even as the pandemic still impacts our lives and livelihoods, companies are stepping up their efforts and new imperatives and business models are emerging every day, as a form of validation of new organizational practices and norms.
The Covid-19 pandemic has been a major disruptor for tried and tested approaches to strategy. More specifically, it acted as an accelerator of two emerging approaches: digital transformation (Soto-Acosta, 2020) and sustainability (Barbier and Burgess, 2020). Even as the pandemic still impacts our lives and livelihoods, companies are stepping up their efforts and new imperatives and business models are emerging every day, as a form of validation of new organizational practices and norms. The pandemic has not only changed our perception of the world but equally accelerated our adoption to new forms of work and production which are becoming visible by the day.
A new survey reveals that 38 percent and 31 percent of managers answered, “we need to re-evaluate” and “we are taking steps to change”, respectively, when responding to how the coronavirus event is affecting their decisions on digital transformation (EY, 2020). In another study, 70 percent of executives surveyed in Austria, Germany and Switzerland claimed the pandemic had pushed them to accelerate the pace of digital transformation within their firms (Malev, 2020). In a survey of almost 1,600 CEOs from 83 countries, 25 percent of the respondents strongly agreed that “climate change initiatives will lead to significant new product and service opportunities for [their] organisation” (PWC, 2020). And in a private conversation with a senior McKinsey’s partner, it was stated that most of the firm’s clients have witnessed an acceleration of roughly 6-7 years in average, on the efforts of digital transformation across industries, sectors and geographies. So, the change did not just allegedly happen, it did happen from the experience of what we have been able to assess in our own practice of educators, consultants and advisors.
These findings are not surprising: companies that are more aggressive in digitizing their activities are more likely to end up achieving superior economic performance (Bughin et al., 2017) and those that actively manage a wide range of sustainability indicators are better able to create long-term value for all stakeholders (Funk 2003).
How do business leaders seize these opportunities?
A STRATEGIC ARCHITECTURE
While the challenges with new normal is always related to the ability to identify existing frameworks that could help and the synthesis of some of the issues we are facing, in this article we present two research-based frameworks of emerging approaches to strategic decision-making that jointly help decision makers to identify growth opportunities and successfully organize to pursue them in the turbulent, post-pandemic world economy. These frameworks were originally designed by aspiring to future fitness, in integrating adaptable and flexible thought processes in their functioning. They were designed as non-exhaustive instruments, purported to grasp the flow of the times in which we are living, rather than advocating seminal theory within 3 levels of critique utilized to best capture the entropy of events, in an ever-complex world, where linear models of distribution are less and less functional to the purpose of prediction and forecast.
The macro level of analysis taps on the contextual need to assess the environment and the nature of the forces that are shaping the conditions for business and public policy to operate. From the scanning of the externalities to the detection of grassroot movements, to the discovery of growth models undetected by traditional economic indicators (Esposito, Tse, Soufani, 2013), this level of analysis is needed to
