The ultimate resilience resource, part one: adaptability

Resilience is one of the key business buzzwords to rise from the COVID-19 pandemic, but it has always been essential to survival. Being a resilient business is  about being able to adapt rapidly to changing environments. It’s having resilient systems and processes, which in turn helps the business to continue operating smoothly in the face of a disruptive event.

COVID-19 is an extreme example of a disruptive event, but with everything changing faster and being more interconnected, a much smaller issue could still bring a business undone, whether that is a competitor, a weather event breaking your supply change, a hacked IT system or the sudden departure of key personnel. 

In this four-part SmartCompany Plus series, we’ll dive into four key pillars of resilience — adaptability, agility, people and community. We’ll unpack what resilience looks like in these areas, and how they can help your business stand up to the toughest of tests.

First up: adaptability.

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A key ingredient in business resilience is ‘adaptability’, but what does adaptability look like in practice? And how can you make it ‘business as usual’ rather than a panic reaction to an unexpected event?

You might think of adaptability as ‘innovating’, ‘disrupting from within’, or ‘pivoting’, and you would be correct on all accounts. It’s defined as “the ability to evolve through trial and error”, according to change consultants Martin Reeves and Kevin Whitaker of the BCG Henderson Institute. It matters because it is a core pillar of business resilience, regardless of the industry you’re operating in.

Adaptability is about trying new ideas, systems, processes, products and services to ensure your business stays relevant and keeps meeting new customer demands. It brings resilience in times of disruption — such as the COVID-19 pandemic — as your business will be more flexible, innovative and equipped to keep operating as smoothly as possible. 

For Reeves and Whitaker, being an adaptable business requires both “natural” and “planned” experimentation, backed up by structured processes to select which ideas are good enough to take forward. Then, the business needs to rapidly scale those ideas into action. The pair emphasise that adaptability shouldn’t be a ‘once off’ activity in the event of a disruption like a pandemic. Instead, it is most effective when integrated into everyday operations, all year round and year after year. 

For business owners who just want to keep doing what they’re doing, these ideas might be confronting. However, as we’ve seen during COVID-19, fate is not kind to companies that can’t or won’t adapt. Meanwhile, those that do adapt can find new revenue streams, even in times of hardship, and will be ready to leap onto even more opportunities when things pick up again. 

Adaptability in practice

Within the SmartCompany network, numerous small-to-medium businesses flexed their adaptability muscles during the COVID-19 pandemic, sharing their results at the SmartCompany Resilience Awards. Here are three case studies that examine how the businesses adapted and the key lessons learned.

Rising to meet a new demand 

When COVID-19 hit, an urgent need arose for hospital-grade hand sanitiser. Melbourne company Mera Chemicals knew that with some adaptation it could meet such a rising demand. 

“However, it wasn’t as simple as flicking a switch,” says owner John Stavrakis. 

Mera specialised in making chemical antifoams and defoamers for countless products such as adhesives, paints, detergents and inks. Despite this skill, it was not in the field of creating flammable goods such as hand sanitiser. 

“People had to be retrained to handle flammable raw materials safely. The other challenge was to apply and fully comply with the Therapeutic Goods Administration manufacturing standards,” says Stavrakis. 

This meant Mera had to modify its manufacturing plant to meet safety standards for production, including equipment and electrical wiring.

“Completely rejigging and restructuring a chemical manufacturing plant is no mean feat — our team worked around the clock,” says Stavrakis. 

In late-2020, the company reported it had supplied upwards of 80,000 litres of hospital-grade sanitiser to medical clinics, aged-care facilities, healthcare centres and police stations.

Now, the business is continuing to sell sanitiser as part of its range — showing shows how adapting quickly can both create entirely new markets for a business and make a positive impact on the community.

 

 

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“The one lesson I would like to pass on is: react quickly to market requirements to make a difference.” John Stavrakis, Mera Chemicals

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Maximising the supply chain

Sydney business Cubic Promote creates promotional products for large-scale conferences and events, as well as for corporate marketing campaigns. When COVID-19 put a stop to in-person gatherings and businesses cut back their marketing spend, Cubic Promote needed a new revenue stream, and it needed one quickly. 

The business saw it could still play a role in this new environment by pivoting its product range from pens and notebooks to pandemic essentials. Drawing on existing supply chain connections, the team sourced face masks, hand sanitiser, thermometers, anti-bacterial wipes and social-distancing products.

The adaptation required new logistics, labelling techniques, product safety standards, website promotions and payment facilities.

“We just had to adjust to getting these and other key products labelled and dispatched at speeds and quantities higher than we’d ever seen before,” says owner Charles Liu. 

Liu says the team rose to the challenge and succeeded, and this experience has affected not just revenue, but how the team feels about their work.

“It was also a unifying experience, all of us working together for a common goal, and Cubic Promote is stronger than ever as a result,” he says.

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“Like many other Aussie companies, adaptation meant our days felt very long at times as we were stretched to our limits, but reflecting back, our decision to diversify stock and adjust our ability to cater to different clientele was absolutely the best one we could have made.” Charles Liu, Cubic Promote

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Putting clients front and centre

IT recruitment company Firesoft People went from “high growth to a trickle in a matter of 24 hours” once the pandemic lockdowns kicked in. 

The Sydney-based business specialised in a highly personalised approach to recruitment — working closely with businesses to place IT experts in niche roles. It involved a lot of networking, interviews, conference attendance and more to understand the sector and uncover the right people for the right jobs.

However, with businesses suddenly cutting budgets or halting recruitment entirely, and with in-person interaction no longer possible, Firesoft People had to adapt to survive. 

The team quickly saw an opportunity to help clients on tighter recruitment budgets to ‘DIY’ their recruitment. They put their heads together and created URecruit, an online platform that takes clients step by step through the recruitment process, making them self-sufficient. The team went from idea to content creation then platform building before going to market at breakneck speed. 

Co-owner Erin Evans says, “revealing many of our secrets and tricks of the trade within this platform was quite controversial”.

However, it has paid off, as the team is set to benefit from an additional revenue stream — even as their core business bounces back. 

“We are poised to really start utilising the full suite of tools at our fingertips and can’t wait to see the power of this transformation start to drive return and growth into 2021.”

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“As a founder, the strongest game you can have is your mental game — what’s going on in your own head. The more comfortable you become with acknowledging ego, blind spots and drivers, and understanding how to trigger resilience and adaptive strategies, the quicker you can act with clarity, focus and bounce back from adversity.” Erin Evans, Firesoft People

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Continuous adaptation in practice

In “The Quest for Resilience”, Gary Hamel and Liisa Vallikangas write that businesses need strategic resilience, defined as “the ability to dynamically reinvent business models and strategies as circumstances change, to continuously anticipate and adjust to changes that threaten their core earning power – and to change before the need becomes desperately obvious”.

This was written in 2003 and was recently republished in the HBR’s Top 10 Must Reads on Organizational Resilience (see the ‘further reading’ suggestions below), showing just how enduring the topic of adaptability really is.

To get on the front foot with adaptability, especially before it becomes business critical, the BCG Henderson Institute offers an Adaptive Advantage framework that organisations can use as a guide.

The five key elements:

1. Signal monitoring

   Signal monitoring is about capturing data using technology, then diving into that information to learn what is happening in and around your business. Then, it’s about using that insight to reinvent your business model or industry. In practice, it might mean using your customer relationship management (CRM) system to monitor customer behaviours. This could reveal potential for your company or industry to deliver a new product or service.

2. Experimentation

   Here, BCG suggests you need to generate, test and replicate many innovative ideas, and quickly. Some others refer to this as “failing fast”, or a “test and learn” culture. Again, this is where technology might help, with tools such as virtual reality and 3D printing opening up possibilities in many industries.

3. Structure

   Your company needs to be set up to make innovation possible. BCG calls this enabling “modularity”, but, in other words, it’s having flexible team structures focused on different projects as needed. You could encourage teams to collaborate, and make it known that it’s okay to test, learn, fail, or, hopefully, succeed.

4. Systems

   The BCG framework suggests collaborating with businesses in your industry, your supply chain, or complementary industries could lead to innovation success. The key is to create value for all players in the process. 

5. Ecosocial advantage

   This final part, ecosocial advantage, is about aligning your business model with a broader social context and communities to help generate value and a competitive advantage. 

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Further reading

HBR’s 10 Must Reads on Organizational Resilience covers topics such as how to reposition your core business while launching a second, and how to keep anticipating and adjusting to emerging trends. In the opening chapter, “How Resilience Works”, Diane Coutu explains how in both personal and business situations, being able to “face down reality” is core to resilience. “We train ourselves how to survive before the fact,” she says. “Improvisation” is another vital ingredient. “Indeed companies that survive regard improvisation as a core skill,” she writes.

This BCG Henderson Institute/HBR article, Adaptability: The New Competitive Advantage, dates back to 2011, but the fundamental messages about the power of adaptability stand the test of time. Some of the Adaptability Advantage framework elements are explored in greater detail in the piece.  

Oliver Wyman consulting firm interviewed Gaston Bottazzini, chief executive officer at Falabella S.A., Latin America, about how the large retail organisation  adapted during COVID-19. Making its vast supply chains work in a new way was a number one priority. “Initially, most of our stores were closed, which meant that the volume of home deliveries really exploded. So while until six months ago, home delivery was something we mostly did internally with our resources — our own distribution centres and contracts with independent transport companies — we now had to adapt ourselves to work with third-party logistics companies to carry out this operation.”