How to shift organizations to be future-proof

Let’s Talk – Jaime Maxwell-Grant

Your challenge is to be more customer-obsessed, more innovative, more agile, more sustainable, more inclusive. I think certainly all the leaders that I speak to are really starting to wake up to the fact that the things that they used to run their organization, how they used to think of organizations operating – you know, commander control, hierarchy, bureaucracy, treating people like expendable resources – if you think like that, you fundamentally cannot get there.

We need to radically rethink.

And the shift I've noticed, particularly in the last 12 to 18 months, is companies who engaged in this before that are really owning up to the idea that we need to radically rethink how are we going to shift the operating system of our organization.

What does the culture need to look and feel like and smell like? What organizational forms are we going to be looking at? What about changes around leadership? The requirements, the work of leadership is fundamentally shifting. What does my workforce need to look like? How do I want them to feel? How do I want them to engage? How are we going to future-proof this organization? So it's a systemic approach and it's becoming increasingly radical.