According to the SHRM Association,³ based on a survey of more than 2,000 HR professionals, one-third of the employers where these surveyed professionals worked had no emergency preparedness plans to deal with disasters. Of those who did have a plan, more than half did not include policies covering communicable diseases. Most employers were struggling to adapt to remote working and reported that they had difficulty maintaining morale among their employees, leading to over a third of them suffering from decreased productivity. This forced 40% of the organizations to shut down certain aspects of their business, with another 19% contemplating doing the same and 10% even facing a total shutdown. In total, 83% of the organizations had to adapt their business practices to the new situation (i.e., no more new hires, decreased hours and/or pay rates for employees, layoffs, offering paid or unpaid leave), with another 8% considering doing the same. Similar disturbing figures are reported by many other sources.⁴ To make matters worse, organizations rarely allocate enough resources to prepare for, let alone deal with, crises such as pandemics.⁵

The situation created by the COVID-19 pandemic is already popularly called the “new normal,” which is described as “a situation of radical change, consistent with a large exogenous shock experienced by firms and society at large. Such shock can be a radical change in institutions or a broader-environment-related shock. Through many cascading effects, somewhat like those found in ecological systems, the shock structurally changes behaviors.”⁶

The new normal forces organizations to adapt their business operations to fit the new situation. It comes on top of the current disruptions organizations have to deal with in their environments. These disruptions can take the shape of megatrends or disruptors:

To illustrate our earlier remark that the COVID-19 pandemic took the world by surprise, we look at the research into megatrends and disruptors, which we started in the summer of 2019. At that time, we could only find megatrends in the academic literature on the “future of work,” there was no mention of disruptors, such as a pandemic in relation to impact on and consequences for organizations at all! In this sense COVID-19 was a wake-up call for us. We had already noticed that academic literature was not that supportive in helping organizations deal with megatrends as there was hardly any advice or ways of copying discussed in that type of literature. Now we found that the same was true for disruptors like COVID-19 and that the managerial literature was no help either.

We needed to expand our scope and search fields to include additional literature that did discuss pandemics. We also came to the understanding that organizations desperately needed advice not only to help them deal with COVID-19 but also to prepare themselves for the occurrence of future disruptors and for dealing with current megatrends. Thus, we decided to expand our original two academic articles that documented the results of our research¹¹ into a managerial book aimed at providing organizations with information about the megatrends and disruptors that they need to deal with now and in the (near) future. But we go one step further than just providing information; we also discuss the courses of action with which organizations can prepare themselves for these megatrends and disruptors. These courses of action help organizations to decide how to adapt their business operations to fit new situations created by (rapidly) changing circumstances. In addition, we will present you with the Futurize! diagnosis, with which you can gauge how ready and prepared your organization is for a future riddled with megatrends and disruptors. The outcome of this self-assessment forms the start for the strategic foresight discussions you are going to conduct with people in your organization so that together you can make your organization future-ready. We wish you much success.

André de Waal & Julie Linthorst, September 2021