The certainty of uncertainty
Sunday, 6 January, 2013 Leave a comment
Sometimes you read something that really strikes a chord. I recently saw this quote from Kurt Vonnegut: "We have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down." In other times, I would read this and it would simply seem like a poetic truism, but I'm currently experiencing a number of shifts in my personal situation which made me read that quote as if it was written just for me.
When the business of a business is pretty predictable, as it was in the Industrial era, there is less need to focus on resilience or responsiveness. In the old days, business could undertake planning exercises and be reasonably safe in the knowledge that the functioning of the business would be able to successfully execute its plans and that the environment would not impinge too greatly on those plans. In the modern era where knowledge is “a core commodity and the rapid production of knowledge and innovation is critical to organisational survival” (Bettis and Hitt, 1995, ‘The new competitive landscape’), business needs to get to grips with the reality of uncertainty and decreasing forecastability. Businesses also need to remember that they are living systems within wider living systems. Global environmental, political, economic and financial challenges all impact on a business’s ability to succeed.
About David G Wilson
