How resilient is your business plan?
Experience and findings from North Star Transition, with support of Apella Advisors and Future Fit
Decades of globalisation and complexification have left organisations entangled in huge systems they feel powerless to change. Yet, global trends in geopolitics, disruptive technologies, fierce global competition, social and political swings as well as the foundations of a stable and liveable planet such as climate and biodiversity are forcing companies to shift their models and practices. How are companies faring with their transition plans? In light of its experience running large scale transition projects, supplemented by conversations with CXOs with the help of Apella Advisors and Future Fit, North Star Transition share insights into what makes for a successful transition, and the factors that impact the resilience of an organisation at a time of massive disruptions.
Introduction
Despite recent political headwinds, most companies recognise transition and sustainability are no longer optional.
The scale and type of change vary by sector, as does the urgency. Insurance companies or companies which depend on agricultural inputs feel the challenges of a warming planet more urgently than perhaps a consulting firm, but each of them needs to develop business models that will allow them to thrive in a world of heightened risk.
The drivers for a transition are many and varied: the climate emergency and biodiversity loss, access to critical resources, wars, tariA, regulatory change, supply chain restructuring. The list goes on.
The significance of the risks companies face is becoming more and more apparent. And yet, progress is much slower than needed to stay within planetary boundaries – and slower than company’s stated ambitions. These ambitions may be under review due to shifting political winds, but the reasons to transition are as urgent as ever. Deliberately slowing down the pace of change only serves to make companies less resilient and less competitive in the medium term.
Decades of complexification and globalisation have left organisations entangled in huge systems that we feel powerless to change. In turn, those systems are nestled in societies grappling with geopolitical turmoil, digital and AI revolutions, growing populations, increasing inequalities, depleting resources, mass migration, changing social norms and the disintegration of any common truth that are all accelerating at breakneck speed. The market signals that businesses would usually rely on to adapt to such seismic change are jammed by yet another host of challenges; a complex web of resistance to change, subsidies, politics, misinformation, incomplete data and more. At best the result is stasis. At worst, degradation.
Thanks to Apella Advisors and Future Fit, North Star Transition recently conducted in-depth interviews with senior leaders across sectors in the U.K. and the EU. We sought to understand their views on how their transition plans are progressing. This paper combines our learning from this survey and from our recent large scale transition projects with published research to explore why corporate transitions are not keeping pace with CEO stated ambitions. The lessons learned from the organisations we spoke to are consistent with our own findings working in large ecosystem regeneration projects. This experience adds useful context which can be applied by company leaders.
Continue reading the full paper, here.