Disruptions need handling creatively.

Causes of disruptions.

Disruptions to your business are not something you can look forward to. But is something coming soon to disrupt it? In business, disruptions cause an unplanned deviation from your vision and objectives. They may be a broken relationship, a location problem, a new government policy, or the impact of mobility, robotics, and social media, to name just a few. Disruptions like a power outage can be minor but very disruptive.

The disruptions you experience, either positive or negative, can cause you to lose control. Sometimes, disruptions are beyond your control, like new entrants to your marketplace. In this case, you can only try to minimise the impact.

Disruptions tend to come without warning.

However, perhaps the biggest challenge is handling significant innovations or new paradigms that tend to come out of the blue. These innovations combine existing technologies that seem unrelated to your offerings while achieving dramatically better value propositions for customers. People involved may not even see you as a competitor.

Information technology is one of the significant disruptions and has shifted the paradigms in most business areas. In an economic sense, it has changed the patterns of investment, production, marketing, employment, and most other business activities.

Disruptions are unsettling, untidy, and usually expensive.

There is no way to avoid disruption in our modern economy. We must adapt or go out of business. Today, Businesses and not-for-profit organisations depend on their ‘leadership model’ to cope with what needs to be done.

During your planning sessions, a checklist of disruptions becomes a valuable tool. This will help to avoid, or at least cope with, future disruptions to your plans and aspirations. Changes today are at least as profound as those that drove the emergence of the mainframe and the PC eras.

We are in a time when social media has become the catalyst for business transformation and customer engagement optimisation. Businesses primarily focus on operational activities, while the talent gap remains challenging. Maintaining control when you are experiencing disruptions may require a higher degree of flexibility. Try using the One-Page Business Plan concept to deal with disruptions you may face.

Coping with disruptions.

As a small organisation, you have a significant competitive advantage. You can be more agile and adaptive to disruptive forces than more prominent organisations. Change will not stop, so becoming a more agile and adaptive business leader is essential.

We stress the importance of each organisation looking at the issues disruptions raise in more detail before developing specific responses.

Prepare your business for natural disasters.

Preparing for supply chain disruptions.