As most organisations move through their digital maturity towards their post digital futures the order of change is often consistent between them:

1. Increasing focus towards the implications of digital / the disruption of technology.
2. New operating model / transformation.
3. Innovation / accelerator programmes.
4. Organisational / culture change.

Most of these steps move in cycles, often repeating over shorter and shorter times frames. And organisations typically recognise the need to continuously move faster in order to keep up with customer and market forces. This can happen a number of ways, for example, creating separate environments with the characteristics of faster organisations (e.g. start-ups).

Part of fuelling this process is the need to understand trends, and identify those likely to materially impact a business over preferably a three year time-frame (although it remains more common to complete a process like this over five years, this has been found to be an unrealistically long time period for accurate predictions and response planning). This then needs to be put in the context of an enterprise strategy. If your company is or is aiming to be a modular producer over this time frame then the resultant prioritisation of trends that your company wants to act on in this time-frame will vary to an organisation wanting to become an omnichannel business.

Response planning to these trends then needs to be determined, with board level sponsorship of the actions that need to be taken and when they will be fulfilled.

This overall process has a number of benefits:

• Noise reduction: it eradicates the continuous debate and uncertainty about which trends are relevant and how the business intends to respond, if at all.
• Shareholder reassurance: potential disruption creates a degree of uncertainty among investors, and it isn’t enough to simply throw money at some of the potential problems or opportunities. A clear plan, and ability to articulate this is also important.
• New response methods: with more up-front planning more choices can be explored (e.g. partnerships or venturing), and along with this more decisive action to explore opportunities through better capital deployment methods. Like moving though an iterative minimum viable product (MVP) cycle before full live business integration planning is determined.
• Clear leadership: this clarity coming from board level / senior stakeholders creates a clear leadership point of view and with this much stronger direction and drive towards response outcomes.
• Finally moving faster: once the plan to act, analyse or simply become more aware of trends has been determined. And the resultant response methods identified, the organisation can look to move fast to determine their position on those trends and in turn use the insight to fuel future plans and market leadership through the emerging competitive advatnage this creates.

All of these things are relatively obvious, and the key to successful planning is largely in the methods and techniques used. And importantly clear ways of communicating and executing them once they are established. This is what is needed to ensure organisations not only move fast, but that they move fast in the right direction. With the clear backing and commitment of the leadership team to support this.