In the pre-COVID-19 era, much management literature started with the observation that the rate of change was very high. Looking back now, we can say that that time was an oasis of calm and stability.1
1.1 The new normal
To state, at the time of writing this book (summer 2021), that the COVID-19 pandemic has had a great impact on society and the business community is clearly an understatement.2
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:
- Megatrends are described as large social, economic, political, and technological changes that are slow to form, but once in place, they have an influence for some time, between seven or ten years or longer.7
- A disruptor is defined as “someone or something that prevents something, especially a system, process or event, from continuing as usual or as expected.”8
The main difference between megatrends and disruptors is the speed with which they appear and the effects they have—megatrends are changes that (often gradually) take place over a longer period of time, while disruptors are short-term, seemingly unexpected sharp changes with high impact.9 Both can present business opportunities, but more often than not, they are seen as threats to future business growth or even to the sustainability of the organization.10
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
A study on the impact of being forward-looking on organizational success found that so-called vigilant organizations that are consciously preparing for the future are 33 to 44% more profitable than those that do not. Vulnerable organizations with limited or almost no foresight practices have a 37% lower profitability. Companies that are struggling and have to fear for their survival because they do little about being forward-looking even have a 44% lower profitability.12
1.2 Reading guide
In Chapter 2, we describe the approach to our research with which we identified thirteen megatrends and one disruptor. This chapter first discusses the difference between a megatrend and a disruptor, after which the research method we used and the megatrends and the disruptor are discussed. In Chapter 3, we describe the HPO framework, which was the analysis tool during our research. Chapters 4 to 17 discuss the megatrends and the disruptor, one at a time. We provide a description of the megatrend/disruptor, describe its impact on organizations, discuss how it relates to the other megatrends and the disruptor, and how organizations can tackle the megatrend/disruptor. In frames scattered throughout the book, we give examples of ways in which the megatrend/disruptor manifests itself in practice and how organizations deal with it. These chapters can be read separately from each other, so they do not have to be read consecutively. In Chapter 18, we make our research results practical in the Futurize! process with, at its heart, the Futurize! diagnosis. In this chapter, we also give a number of practical examples of organizations that have used the Futurize! diagnosis.
Quick reading guide
As stated, not all chapters need to be read sequentially. We advise the reader in a hurry to read chapters 2, 3, and 18. With this, you are aware of the thirteen megatrends and the disruptor, the HPO framework, and the Futurize! diagnosis, which makes the results of our research (in which the megatrends and the disruptor are linked to the factors of the HPO framework) practically useful for your organization.
The practical value of this book is illustrated by this comment by Professor Lynda Gratton: “The future of work is one of the most burning platforms of the next few years. Time alone will tell whether the anguish will convert to action.”13 Our book helps organizational leaders with their decision-making and prioritization of improvement and innovation projects so that they adequately and effectively deal with their fears about the future of work—and thus the future of their organizations. As a result, they will not feel fear but will be proud of the resilience of their organization—and of their own resilience also because they have ensured the organizational sustainability of their organizations. Happy reading and good luck with Futurizing!14
1.3 Acknowledgments
The cliché says that you never write a book alone. In our case, of course, that’s completely appropriate because we wrote the book together. But even then, there is a group of people who have been invaluable in the production of this book, and we would like to thank them. First of all, many thanks to all the pilot organizations that participated in the development of the Futurize! process. In addition, there were people who contributed to the various roundtable discussions where parts of this book were discussed and fine-tuned. A number of people contributed beyond the call of duty: Gemma Cooymans, who did a lot of research, sorting out, and classification during the identification of the megatrends and disruptors; Caroline Hetterschijt, who contributed to two articles (which are incorporated in this book); and Monique Lindzen, who, as a publisher of Van Duuren Management, was immediately enthusiastic about the concept and published the Dutch version of the book. Finally, we are grateful ...
