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Here’s how your business can survive (and even prosper) in a disruptive industry

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Organisations are grappling with greater levels of disruption across multiple industry sectors than ever seen before.

Burying your head in the sand at the onslaught of constant disruption can have dire consequences on your organisation. It’s time to get real and embrace disruption, because it’s here to stay.

But it’s not as gloomy as you might think. In fact, your organisation could even benefit from disruption if you use the push as motivation for change.

We all admire the great disrupters. Tech startups like Uber, Airb&b and Amazon have revolutionised the way consumers consume. But we can’t shy away from the fact that these industry revolutionaries have also caused the financial collapse of entire businesses trying to compete in these respective industries.

Where does disruption come from?

Disruption comes in many other forms aside from tech, though. Disruption includes new industry competition, changes introduced by your industry regulators, technology or new ways of working. Either way, the impacts can be just as financially devastating.

Whether or not your organisation succeeds in the face of disruption comes down to your ability to embrace agility and innovation. This goes far beyond introducing a new taskforce, or simply adopting the hot-desking trend.

The old ways of managing the operational environment of an organisation will not cope with the rate of change necessary for survival. A traditional operational model relies on documents, departments and hierarchy will no longer cut it in the face of increasing disruption.

But what often hinders major organisational change is the sheer complexity of large organisations. Siloed departments, inconsistent processes, traditional hierarchy structures, ineffective document management and a general disconnect between strategy and execution can make it almost impossible to achieve innovation and agility.

Innovation and agility needs to be ingrained into an organisation’s operational model. Now more than ever, organisations need to be customer-centric, and connect the people, processes and policy to improve the customer’s experience. And that doesn’t happen overnight.

However, statistics don’t paint a very rosy picture when it comes to change. According to McKinsey & Co, 70 per cent of organisational change initiatives fail, largely due to employee resistance and lack of management support.

What can you do about disruption?

Organisations need to start with the basics, and rethink their entire operational environment. Rather than introduce improvements department by department or silo by silo, executives need to have the ability to actually see how change will impact entire value chains that flow horizontally and vertically across the organisation.

In effect, your business systems should enable you to effectively ‘see’ around corners so that the disruption that will inevitably come your way doesn’t force your organisation onto its knees.

The right tools can ensure that your people and supporting technology are singing from the same hymn book as a single source of truth to deliver organisational harmony. It all starts with the business management system that pulls your organisation together.

You need tools that will help you see how the many moving parts of your organisation work together to deliver value. So start with a business management system that makes every element of your internal structures transparent. That way you’ll have far more success than trying to convince staff that they need to change.

Bruce Nixon is the CEO at Holocentric. Holocentric helps organisations to improve performance by helping them to understand how people, process and technology come together to satisfy client needs, meet regulatory obligations and achieve business outcomes. The Holocentric BMS addresses the gap between enterprise systems and business needs by acting as a dynamic model of your business operations that draws upon the relationships between all aspects of operations.

Bruce Nixon_Holocentric