Why Organisations need Adaptive Work Cultures

It is worth casting our minds back to how our parent’s and grandparent’s generation did business to get an idea of how much things have changed and how quickly technology moves on.

Communication technology, automation and increasingly powerful computing, have all had a massive impact on the way businesses operate across all sectors. Changing career expectations and work patterns have also had an effect.

While the business landscape or climate has changed almost beyond recognition since the 1950s, or even the 1980s, the way we organise our companies and train our workforce has been far slower to adapt. Many large businesses still follow management principles that were first laid down in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

These ways of thinking are simply not suited to meet the challenges of the modern digital economy, with the result that many companies find themselves having to continually reorganise their structures to adapt to change. This merry-go-round is frustrating and expensive. It need not be like this.

So, the primary reason for making your organisation more adaptive is to save the need to restructure your team every few years to adapt to a new technology or a new business model or a merger or a new set of regulations and so on.

Can this be done and is it even desirable to do so?

The idea of a corporate reorganisation is often enough to make even the most experienced manager’s blood run cold. Such major changes inspire dread in employees at every level of a business, and wide-ranging change management is fraught with risk.

The fear of change is often enough to impact the ability of businesses to make fluid and meaningful change decisions and is more reason to alter the way we look at change, response and reorganisation.  

For more on creating an adaptive organisation, download our free eBook, Introduction to Adaptive Business Practices.