Leadership Challenge: Business Resiliency

As an innovation leader, if you had to channel your resources to mitigate the single-most consequential threat to your company, what would that threat be? Would it be related to: (a) international trade compacts and input cost escalation; (b) inflation and headwinds to market demand; (c) policy/judicial/consumer activism and brand value destruction; or (d) competitive actions and market share decline?

• Is there a framework/process that allowed you to arrive at your chosen threat? How fleeting or long lived is this threat for your company’s ability to execute its strategy?
• What is the role of innovation in your company’s ability to address this threat? Does this threat require you to refine your innovation portfolio — including resourcing for incremental vs. transformational innovation, opportunity screening criteria, and assumptions around scale, time, and profitability?
• How will you engage your C-suite peers within business divisions, marketing, and finance to mitigate this threat?

Potential Avenues: Signals and Practices

Given your choice of the most consequential threat above, are there ways to remain vigilant?

• How do you identify and monitor weak signals that could accelerate this (and other) threat(s)? How do you determine when these weak signals demand a response?
• Does your weak-signal monitoring process feed into scenario planning, technology road mapping, and other workstreams? How do you exploit AI in weak signal monitoring? Is scouting for threats a new skill you need to build within your organization?
• If and when you update the board on this high-consequence threat, how do you characterize probable impacts on your innovation outcomes?

Taking Action: Three Questions

• What is the biggest learning from today’s discussion, and how will you operationalize it within your own organization?​
• What questions remain in your mind about the ideas, challenges, and solutions that we discussed today?​
• What would you suggest as a topic/agenda for our next Executive Roundtable?