Business Strategy
Is Your Organisation Built to Adapt and Survive?
IN-PERSON AFTERNOON MEETING, LONDON AND LIVE-STREAM
WHO SHOULD ATTEND?
WHY SHOULD YOU ATTEND?
The implications of recent global events are extreme for the design, development and management of commercial organisations. We are still learning to adapt to a world of radical uncertainty – and to survive its many challenges.
There are challenges that already face us half-way through the 2020s. This session will support us to take stock of how the business environment has transformed and assess the scale and speed at which recognised developments might play out. How might organisations adapt to and even exploit the cumulative headwinds we face? How should they build the structures to leverage organisational capability and performance? What will the role of HR and Reward professionals be in navigating these turbulent times and creating organisations that can survive and thrive? These questions will be discussed at this session and in the accompanying report.
EVENT CONTENT
The speed of technological change, shrinking working age populations, social polarisation and intergenerational tensions will force us to rethink the basis on which commercial organisations have been built and indeed the purpose and role of such organisations in society. Against a backdrop of low growth, stagnant productivity, volatile inflation, accelerating climate change, and geopolitical instability, companies are faced with an alignment of factors which reinforce each other and create compound and cumulative effects – what historian Adam Tooze has termed a ‘polycrisis’.
Getting to grips with the perceptions and motivations of the ‘Gen Z’ demographic – now aged between 14 and 26 – is seen as an ‘existential’ issue by some business leaders. Growing up with technology, coming of age during the pandemic, and being more comfortable talking about private, social and political issues at work seems to have stretched the gap between them and their older colleagues. Anxiety about younger people in the workplace has often been a feature of business life, but there is wide agreement that the coming decade will demand a more fundamental re-think of the value proposition to attract this critical resource.
Hoping for a revolution in technology won’t cut it. We must anticipate the impact of these rapid shifts before the imagined technological leap occurs. This is an immediate challenge, not one for the next decade – however appealing the soundbite tag of ‘2030’ may appear.
ANYTHING ELSE?
This session, and its accompanying report, will draw on key economic, social and environmental data and on the expertise of leading thinkers in this space. It will get behind the hysteria of the headlines and focus on what the evidence is telling us about the changes in organisations and the environments in which they operate. We will hear from business leaders, academics and think tanks, who will provide us with key insights that will enable us to bring greater perspective to an increasingly volatile and complex picture.
We will discuss these topics, and share the findings of our report, at subsequent discussion lunches in Amsterdam and Zurich too.
LOCATION
The Royal Air Force Club, 128 Piccadilly, London W1J 7PY
SPEAKERS
Marleen Huysman
Professor at the School of Business and Economics, VU Amsterdam
Marleen Huysman is Professor at the School of Business and Economics, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, where she heads the AI@Work research group. Marleen is founding director of the KIN Center of Digital Innovation and is using and promoting ethnographic methods to study how AI tools are developed, introduced and used in various organisations and industries. Marleen’s latest interest is in how Generative AI tools are changing knowledge work. Her work has been published in books and many international peer reviewed journals
Prof. Thomas Roulet
Fellow, Director of Studies in Psychology & Behavioural Science, and Co-Director of the King’s Entrepreneurship Lab at King’s College, Cambridge University
Professor Thomas Roulet is a social scientist researching and teaching how individuals and organisations can lead social change, and adapt to a changing workplace, especially around wellbeing. He consults for and advises policy makers, public and private organisations on those issues. His work has appeared regularly in outlets such as the Academy of Management Journal, Review, Organization Science, Harvard Business Review and the MIT Sloan Management Review, and been featured in The Economist and The Financial Times.
Giles Wilkes
Senior Fellow at the Institute for Government, and Partner for Flint Global
Giles splits his time between business consultancy Flint Global and the Institute for Government. In the past ten years he has worked as special adviser to Vince Cable, secretary of state for Business, and prime minister Theresa May, across all aspects of business policy. In between, he has enjoyed stints as a writer of comment for The Financial Times and in various roles at IG Group, a financial derivatives specialist.
