Phoenix rising: Creating a 'future fit' business

Today, we find ourselves called to operate amid increasing complexity, volatility and system stresses.

What lies ahead for our leaders, managers and entrepreneurs is an increasing proliferation of "non-normative" ruptures across our interwoven socio-economic, corporate and political operating system.Burgeoning debt crises, fragile world economies, volatile stock markets, vulnerable global supply chains, increasing stakeholder tensions, widening socio-economic disparity, climate change, refugee crises, disruptive technologies and increasing ecological challenges are just some inter-related issues heralding a new way of doing business.

因此，我们的许多领导者和经理发现自己纠缠在商业逻辑上，这使我们陷入了惯常的思维方式中。

作为导演Institute of Statecraft, Chris Donnelly notes the rate of change we are going through is comparable to what happens in war time. Klaus Schwab, executive chairman of the World Economic Forum, echoed this by noting that we live in a time of great promise and peril, a time of simultaneous breakdown and breakthrough.

Put simply, business-as-usual is no longer an option. And yet so many of our leaders and managers find themselves entangled in a business logic that keeps us inured in our business-as-usual mindset, holding us back from placing the new steps of change so vitally needed for our organizations to become未来.

A最近报告（PDF）21st世纪政治家全球领导人表明，“执行近视”在跨越企业，政府和第三部门的高级管理人员中是地方性的：短期主义，反应性厌恶和系统性的恐惧，将重点放在成本削减而不是开箱即用的思维上，认知超负荷和不和谐，顶级不情愿与焦虑，脆弱和疲劳融为一体。

该报告绝不是例外，其发现补充了全球各地的一系列研究，所有这些研究都促成了广泛的局限性和加深的“复杂性差距”，因为领导者坚持了过时的逻辑，而海洋的变化则变化。

在我们需要勇敢地改变运营和组织方式的时候，我们发现自己被最初造成问题的逻辑所包围。

This is not to undermine a number of positive developments taking place on complex global leadership issues such as the U.N. Global Goals campaign and theCOP21 agreements几个月前，在巴黎，各种非政治利益相关者帮助确保了建设性的结果。

Yet, the cold reality is most of our leaders — across government, corporate and non-profit institutions — are struggling to cope with current conditions. Things are set to get yet more complex, uncertain and challenging. As management guru Peter Drucker once famously noted, "In times of turmoil, the danger lies not in the turmoil itself but in facing it with yesterday’s logic."

This age of uncertainty demands new ways of operating and organizing: distributed, networked, anti-fragile, flourishing firms of the future.

This "new norm" reaches well beyond orthodox organizational logic by seeding wholly new ways of doing and being. It is a liberating transformation which happens at all levels of our culture: from the everyday meeting protocols designed for control transforming into more collaborative methods such as hackathons, swarms and open space technology; to top-down control-based bureaucracy transforming into locally attuned teams of people empowered to adapt to ever-changing conditions within their sphere of operation.

Enter myriad organizations thriving amid uncertainty by applying living-systems logic: on-line retailerZappos;保健提供者Buurtzorg;银行Triodos;艺术家版权所有Vaga;化学制造商Scott Bader;global network of social-enterprise community centersImpact Hub;多媒体提供商听起来很正确, to name a few.

以更自然，更活跃，更具创造力的方式运行我们的组织并不是一些未来主义的乌托邦愿景。您阅读本文时正在发生。它已经成为主流，我们都应该开始拥抱它，否则我们很快将成为昨天的新闻。

随着变革的风向消失了，是指挥和控制文化和“人力资源”管理的人为确定性和机械线性，揭示了一种更加新鲜，有目的性，完全更具人为的方法来实现我们的工作方式。

To aid this transformation, here are five important areas for leaders to focus on in these transformational times:

1. Communication

与他人交流；通过创建协作网络来真正与我们的同行和利益相关者共享并分享，而这些网络不仅仅是通过将未来的原型汇入原型来进行头脑风暴。

2. Innovation

在组织中，“加速器臭鼬工厂”，“孵化器”或“创新枢纽”在隐身模式下（例如Google X）像Cocoons一样运行，在该组织中，整个组织中明亮的开箱即用的创新者可以从事企业家探索。在组织的支持下，他们可以投资这些原型，并在活动旋转或集成到主要业务之前对其进行测试。

3.董事会的多样性

Yes, we need more diversity and inclusiveness in terms of age, sex and race, but also in our ways of thinking. We need to bring in non-conformists that provoke and cajole with different perspectives and insights. This can be achieved through inviting a wider range of non-executive directors, having a greater variety of external advisers and using innovative forward-thinking consultants and coaches beyond the traditional mainstream consultancies.

4. Sense of purpose

正如保罗·波尔曼（Paul Polman）所指出的那样，我们需要培养内部兼职，发展自己的连贯性，花时间和精力开始“了解自己”的过程，以了解我们更深入的目标，超越了我们的自我，并且适应的面具。当我们将外在的行动与内在的目标感相结合时，我们就可以使更深入的创造性冲动和真实性流过我们的工作。同上我们的团队和利益相关者。

5. Time and space

Taking personal responsibility for our work schedules and recognizing that the continual busyness and stress actually undermines our ability to think out-of-the-box and sense our inner compass. Each of us can be more effective at managing our diaries, creating blocks in our schedule for "systemic thinking" where we can reflect, pause and learn to tune in to our more intuitive awareness and authentic, soulful selves.

There is no sustainable transformation without leadership. Leadership enables us to traverse our own thresholds while helping others traverse theirs. The root of the word leadership isleith,which means "to go forth and cross the threshold," to let go of old ways while allowing new ways to take root.

毕竟，我们人类是天生的创造力，热情，欢乐，协作，社交，充满爱心的生物。现在是时候开始以我们的名字来辜负homo sapiens(wise beings) by metamorphosing our organizational logic towards the wisdom of life.