Building a roadmap for resiliency and growth

Virtually every business has been challenged to navigate a combination of near-term volatility caused by disruptive events – including inflation, war, and natural disasters – and a series of powerful structural changes. Decades of easy money, plentiful labor, nearly friction-free global trade, and low inflation are coming to an end. Everyone is bracing for the coming decade, which will likely be defined by scarcity, high input costs, and lower potential growth.

Add it up, and you have higher costs of doing business, lower degree of freedom for strategic action, and even less margin for execution error. To prosper in this environment, you need new approaches to strategy, planning, investing, culture, and talent. You need to operate simultaneously on multiple time horizons – addressing cost takeout opportunities today while planning for and investing in long-term strategies for growth and innovation.

This quest to identify and make the perfect moves can lead to “analysis paralysis.” But it doesn’t have to. There are several things you can do now to lay the groundwork for the changes your company may need in strategy, planning, and operations.

Consider these possible no-regrets moves:

1. Review and refresh your strategy. Review your organization’s strategic plan in the context of today’s complex and dynamic realities. What are the risks that were not accounted for in your original plan? How resilient is your strategy in the face of disruptions – whether in talent pools, supply chains, or macroeconomic factors?
2. Build an early warning system. Look for ways to use data analytics and artificial intelligence to improve your organization’s early warning system. Find ways to use historical data to help predict and detect disturbances in your markets.
3. Update enterprise risk management (ERM). Revisit risk assessments and apply ERM more broadly. Build mechanisms for handling disruptions.
4. Make resilience a function. These times demand that you do more than optimize costs. You should thoughtfully determine where to invest in resilience. To prepare for disruption, consider creating SWAT teams staffed, trained, and equipped with playbooks to respond to disruptive events.
5. Accelerate key transformation efforts (while keeping an eye on cost takeout). If your organization is like most, you already have multiple transformation projects under way. Make sure to prioritize the ones with the greatest potential impact. Give these key initiatives the attention and resources needed to be completed successfully and start delivering value. Along the way, lean into data-driven analysis to identify opportunities for cost takeout. Identify categories of smart cuts you can make in the short, medium, and long term – without compromising quality, growth, or competitive position. Then reinvest the savings in greater resilience.

Above all, stay focused on value and keep a close eye on your organization’s culture. Continually explore opportunities to apply technology and reimagine experiences for your employees, customers, partners, and clients. And lean into data to identify, quantify, and implement opportunities that deliver rapid EBITDA improvement while positioning your organization for continued resilience and growth.