by Patrick Awodu
December 2, 2024
The war in Ukraine, the war in Gaza, flooding in the Sahara and Gulf States, flooding in Spain, the supply chain disruptions, the lingering effects of the pandemic, emerging disruptive technologies – all point to a new reality: We have entered an era where the pace of change is rapidly increasing, where change is no longer episodic but continuous, and where uncertainty, volatility and complexity are now the norm not the exceptions.
This ‘New Normal’, initially triggered by the pandemic and its impact on the world of work and way of doing business, has since morphed into the hydra it is today – a socio-economic landscape bedevilled by many unknown variables. This is especially true for Nigeria and Africa.
While there are possibilities, in keeping with the theme of increased uncertainty, that the economic climate would normalize in the near future, most political and business leaders do not expect it to. For businesses in Nigeria 2024 has been particularly turbulent and tough with economic head winds making a farce of plans and budgets conceived at the top of the year. A lot of businesses and organisations have been impacted negatively, some are barely surviving and just a few are thriving.
As businesses prepare and plan for 2025, one way to ensure that you win in 2025, is to build up your organisation’s change muscles. There are three ways building change capability supports organisations win in this new normal:
- Building and increasing your organisation’s change capabilities will ensure that you can keep pace with emerging trends, threats and opportunities, which has become a key element for success in this new era.
- Developing change leadership across your organisation ensures that your organisation’s transformation initiatives and projects, selected and designed by management as the vehicles for achieving their strategic objectives, meet those objectives and deliver on the expected benefits, further fuelling the success and health of the organisation.
- Change Leadership, that is increased change capability, is a meta-capability that allows you to successfully layer on other capabilities – Agile, Lean, Six Sigma etc. This means that organisations with change leadership can truly become omni-dextrous and bank the benefits of that.
So, as you mull over the strategies and tactics to adopt to improve your organisation’s odds of success in the coming year, one lever you should definitely pull is building up your organisation’s change leadership capacity.
