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ATD Blog

5 Learning Strategies for Resilience in the Consolidation Age

Wednesday, November 30, 2016
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Global competition is heating up and a wave of consolidation is sweeping various industries, from the tech economy to the old economy. Google and General Electric continue to master their domains and expand their reach. Microsoft bought LinkedIn, and Bayer is looking to buy Monsanto. On Wall Street, the five largest banks have increased their share of banking assets from 25 percent in 2000 to 45 percent today.  AT&T, America’s second largest wireless-telecom firm, is looking to buy Time Warner, the country’s second biggest media firm. 

In addition, big companies have reaped enormous efficiencies by creating supply chains that stretch around the globe. They hope to realize immense gains by controlling complementary assets, just as AT&T is looking to combine distribution with content. 

Business organizations on the other side of these mergers, though, must take heed of this situation. Learning professionals at these organizations have an awesome responsibility to reflect on the content and context of their learning programs and realign their efforts to enhance organizational resilience. To survive and thrive in the face of consolidation and collapsing market shares and margins, they must embrace resilience in their plans.     

Resilience is the ability of an organization to reorganize and deliver its core function continually, despite the impact of internal or external disruptors. It is an adaptive capacity of an organization to a changing and complex environment. In the age of consolidation, here are five learning strategies that can boost your organization’s resilience capital.

Deploy Pervasive Collaborative Technology

Unless there is a really good reason not to, let everybody see everybody’s real work. Allow employees to filter and sort good content for themselves. Keep it simple and open. Build communities of trust that can share intellectual property.  Challenge people to think options not integration, adaptability not static efficiency. 

Use Metaphors

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Our brains are designed to create content, not hold onto content. Metaphors can be powerful catalysts for generating new business strategies by combining disparate ideas or transferring insights from one domain of reality to another. Effective metaphors, Aristotle wrote, are either “those that convey information as fast as they are stated…or those that our minds lag just a little behind.” Only in such instances is there “some process of learning,” the philosopher concluded.

Make Risk Everyone’s Business

 Add a dose of “risk-storming” to your brainstorming exercise. The risks organizations face are dynamic and some have a habit of confounding predictions. Risk learning involves intentional and non-judgmental focus on the risk landscape and thinking through risk interconnections and the cascading effects that could emanate from them

Look for Meaning Beyond the Math

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The full range of consequences of a business decision cannot be shoehorned into a single equation. Challenge learners to analyze cases that have seemingly straightforward technical challenges and then gradually peel away the layers to reveal hidden strategic, economic, human and political complexities – all of which must be plumbed to reach truly effective business decisions

Experiment and Exploit the Neglected 80%

The Pareto Principle dictates that companies derive 80 percent of their value from about 20 percent of their products and customers. Instead of rushing to lop off the 80 percent of uncertain value generators, organizations can experiment with unlikely combinations of assets, tools, and technologies. They can place a hundred small bets instead of a few big ones. 

Resilience is essentially about renewal and evolution, about having the capacity to change before the case for change becomes desperately obvious. In the Consolidation Age, the world is changing faster and becoming more turbulent than organizations are becoming resilient. But it is in such delicately unsettled times that we are most open to creative ways of looking at things, learning to become resilient.

About the Author

Ali Agha is the president of Think-Cycle Consulting. He specializes in leadership development and strategy and risk management. He has delivered learning solutions for organizations including Memphis, Light, Gas and Water (MLG&W), the nation’s largest three service public utility, Al-Jazeera Network, Kuwait Petroleum Corporation and others. He holds a bachelor’s degree and a master’s degree in chemical engineering from the University of Rochester and Lehigh University, respectively. Contact him at [email protected].

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