Is your business built to survive?

Take on Tomorrow

The episode explores how businesses can prepare for increasingly interconnected disruptions such as cyberattacks, geopolitical shocks, and s

Key takeaways

• Bobbie Ramsden-Knowles suggests identifying a 'minimum viable company'—the core services and people that must remain operational during disruption.
• Amy Webb argues that leaders often mistakenly treat systemic shifts as isolated, one-off freak events rather than nodes in a larger shifting system.
• Strategic foresight is presented as a discipline of assembling data to identify patterns and build plausible scenarios for decision-making.
• Bobbie Ramsden-Knowles notes that the historical focus on lean efficiency has often come at the expense of organizational resilience.
• Amy Webb highlights that psychological safety is critical for organizations that need to take action on future predictions.

Main topics

• Business Resilience
• Strategic Foresight
• Crisis Management

Notable quotes

What is the one belief about your business that everybody in the company has and believes is permanent? And what would have to be true for that to be wrong?

Conclusion

To survive modern disruption, leaders must move beyond reactive planni

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:01) There are tons of forces shaping the future of business and governing. And I would argue that the vast majority of them are overlooked. You've got to think about your Speaker 4 (0:12) ecosystem because no organization is an island. And actually the attention and focus on that system's resilience has become even more important now. Speaker 2 (0:21) Something I ask executives all the time. What is the one belief about your business that everybody in the company has and believes is permanent? And what would have to be true for that to be wrong? The old way of doing business Speaker 5 (0:37) is over. From disruptive technology like AI to geopolitical tensions, business leaders need to be ready for change before it even happens. So how do you act before you know what's coming? I'm Femi Oke, a broadcaster and journalist. Speaker 3 (0:55) And I'm Lizzie O'Leary, a podcaster and journalist. And this is Take On Tomorrow, the podcast from PwC. And Speaker 5 (1:02) welcome to our news series, which looks at how to build momentum around bold ideas. Today, Speaker 3 (1:09) is your business built to survive? Speaker 3 (1:15) Shortly, we'll hear from futurist Amy Webb on how she thinks business leaders should prepare for disruption. But Speaker 5 (1:21) first, to help us understand the challenges business leaders are facing, we're delighted to be joined by Bobbi Ramston-Knowles, a partner from PwC UK, who co-leads PwC's Global Centre for Crisis and Resilience. Hello, Bobbi. Hi there. So, Bobbi, organisations are facing so many disruptions right now. What are the main issues that leaders should be thinking about today? Speaker 4 (1:46) We're facing into really complex risks, whether that's geopolitical or indeed a supply chain disruption, cyber, AI. These risks are not only overlapping and conflating out, but they're causing real disruption for organizations. And we have to work out how are we going to actually continue to grow and generate value as well as protect the business through these different. disruptive events. So one of the questions a lot of leadership teams are asking right now, and I'm encouraging them to ask themselves, is if we lost everything tomorrow, what do we actually have to keep running in our business that matters the most? What actually really keeps our organisation viable through all that disruption? And actually, it's quite interesting when you ask that question at an executive level, the answers you get are very, very different. And that's really where the real conversation around resilience starts. Speaker 3 (2:42) Bobby, you listed a number of different challenges and sort of periods of change that businesses are going through. How well prepared do you think current businesses are to deal Speaker 4 (2:54) with all those challenges? So a lot of organizations have built plans. They've tested crisis plans. They've got business continuity plans, disaster recovery. Some organizations have even appointed chief resilience officer. Question is, is that enough? That is where it gets quite interesting because actually a plan when tested, as we've seen the last couple of years where organizations have had to respond to cyber attacks or geopolitical risk and supply chain disruption, had those plans actually withstood the disruption they faced? And the answer in some cases is no. And I think it's because actually the way we've built our resilience capabilities isn't perhaps. fit for what we need for the future. And by that, I mean, we perhaps haven't always focused on protecting the things that matter the most to the organization. We've actually tried to make all of our organization resilient rather than focusing on the most critical parts. And putting resilient strategies enable us to protect what we would call is your minimum viable company, the smaller set part of your organizations, your services, your products that really mean that if you're hit by disruption, you will remain viable, you will remain compliant, you will maintain trust with your stakeholders. And I think a lot of organizations have got a lot of work to do around that still. It sounds like business Speaker 5 (4:16) leaders may need to start thinking very differently about how they deal with risk and disruption. Speaker 3 (4:24) Exactly, Femi. And to help us understand how to navigate... all of these changes, I spoke to someone who spends a lot of her time thinking and speaking about this issue with the business world. Amy Webb is a futurist, author, and the CEO of the Future Today Strategy Group. And we began by talking about how leaders should navigate disruptive events. Speaker 2 (4:51) There are tons of forces shaping the future of business and governing. And I would argue that the vast majority of them are overlooked. So what I'm seeing happen is that leaders are treating every shock at this stage as a freak event, as like a one-off. So whether it's a chip shortage or a bank collapse or an election that goes in a direction