The Whirlwind Season: A Time for Transformative Resilience.

The Whirlwind Season: A Time for Transformative Resilience.

COVID-19 Struck the Scene; Season of Epic Unknowns.

            What a season! Last year ushered a deluge of epic knowns as COVID-19 struck the scene. Beyond our human radars, a virus emerged to upend the world with its global threat. Now—nearly two years into this tempestuous scene—the twister persists, entering 2022 with unprecedented unforeseen impacts. However, one certain lesson lingers: “Expect the unexpected.”

Digital Whirlwind—Innovation through Improvisation: ‘Lemon-aiding’ Solutions.

     The pandemic spawned a digital whirlwind in its encompassing impact to shared services. This conclusion comports with prevailing GBS/SSO opinion. In a North American Shared Services 2021 ‘One Year on’ Survey concerning workforce transformation, when asked about the pandemic influence, about 70% of respondents reported at least some effect, with approximately 20% opining “dramatic impacts to people, processes, and technologies.” Also, central—at the eye of this whirlwind—lies automation. For example, the Global Market Review: Intelligent Automation in Shared Services revealed nearly ¾ of respondents link the pandemic with accelerated automation adoption. A 2021 SSON analytics survey found that 66% of companies exhibited only basic or developing automation proficiencies. Additionally, 55% of respondents in Global Intelligent Market Review—IA Implementation to Date indicated less than “20 automated processes” running their digital enterprise. However, these challenges catalyze the desire for innovation through improvisation—an opportunity to foster resilience. Innovation through improvisation embodies transformation, the ability to make lemonade from lemons, embracing change with “problem-based solutions.”  As McKinsey stated, over 70% of digital transformations fail. These failures correlate with “insufficient investment” in resilience—building sustainable cross-functional capabilities able to withstand change as companies seek innovation. Rather than start from scratch, companies embrace change, taking their digital lemons and learning to make lemonade. Here, enterprises spearhead innovation, “lemon-aiding” solutions instead of “band-aiding” existing problems because such short-sighted limited impact approaches fail to propel long-term transformation. Instead of staying with lemons, stuck in siloed entrenchments, they improvise, conquering challenges to create lemon-aid—value-added innovation-focused enhancements. Canda Rozier, CIAP, Procurement Evangelist envisioned a Venn-Diagram with culture/EQ centralizing existing processes and transformative technologies. To Rozier, leaders inspire solutions, lemon-aiding enterprise-wide automation-enhanced efficiencies through people-centricities. The game-changer rests with resilience—advantaging uncertainty to surpass performance benchmarks amid unforeseen adversity in what acclaimed author Nassim Taleb characterized “anti-fragile” transformation.

Shared Services Raises “Lemon-aid” Stand for Resilience.

            COVID-19 turned the world table. As an incidental effect, supply-chain inventory shortages abound—from semiconductors to computer chips—with severe cargo immobilization in the Pacific, exacerbating scarcity and expense. Still, shared services raised their “lemon-aid” stands to sing a different song, achieving resilience via heightened agility, cost-savings, and COVID-related support. According to respondents from our 2021 surveys:

• 51% reported improved employee productivity.
• 80% indicated “equal or higher level” service capacity.
• 68% of Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) maintained or exceeded expectations.

Current Climate Demands Transformation.

Shared services showed resilience with “lemon-aid” solutions, adapting existing “lemons” to transformative technologies in an almost anti-fragile agility, that thrived amid unforeseen adversities. As Ilse Kerling —Team Transformation Strategist—asserts, transformation relinquishes “existing barriers” allowing enterprises to fail-fast without fear of judgment. Success refuses to settle. According to Kerling, organizations “soar” when they “harness team synergies” with a “pro-change mindset.” But the challenge rests in fostering “transformative ideas” because not every personality exhibits an innovation-oriented propensity. This inference comports with existing empirical data. As Kerling asserts, purported studies suggest:

• Only “21% of global population” comprises “innovative people”
• 79% (“non-innovative-types") show strengths in practical optimization solutions
• 49% of the 79% also revealed resistance to change.

            If accurate, not everyone embraces “new ideas.” Moreover, not every new idea solves relevant problems.  Nevertheless, assuming these studies, lemon-aided solutions facilitate transformative resilience, helping organizations overcome fears of change, balancing practical problem-solving with new ideas to achieve pertinent solutions. Some transformative resilience solutions include:

• Independent Diligence: Investor due diligence to assess business trajectory potential
• Bottom-up Planning: Design transformation plan initiative with financial projections
• Value Implementation: Execute enterprise-wide value drivers of bottom-line goals

These solutions help expedite arising opportunities. The chess-game strategy logic to “lemon-aid” transformative resilience entails two-steps:

1. Change Management. Change management exploits tactical action. Tactical action instills a “pro-change” mindset, mobilizing team talent ‘chess pieces’ to spearhead sustainable transformation.

2. Performance Infrastructure. Next, companies evaluate ‘chess pieces” to stabilize performance infrastructure, aligning people, processes, & technologies for superior delivery execution. Here, companies perform a SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) Analysis, scrutinizing the entire chessboard (competitive outlook), to consider overlooked strategic assumptions. Those assumptions enable enterprises to exploit strengths/weaknesses as innovation opportunities and evaluate threats—external environment challenges.

Accordingly, rather than succumb to “entrenched thinking” with fear-ridden loss-averse patterns that obstruct innovation, uncertainty presents gilded growth-gem opportunities, if organizations welcome change. Transformative resilience lemon-aids solutions, taking lemons (existing resources), inferring ‘pro-change’ strategies from assumed service delivery patterns. Collaborating to transform inspires optimization because efficiency often implies corresponding returns commensurate with risk assumed.  Jack Welch once said, “if rate of change exceeds change on the inside, the end is near.” No words seem more apropos. Yet, the “rate of change” leaves limited room “but to transform.” Therefore, the current climate demands transformation. Ultimately, an auspicious future awaits shared services, assuming organizations continue lemon-aiding innovation—aligning people, processes, and technologies with transformative automations solutions.

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