What Can IKEA Teach Us About 2021 Business Planning?
Imagine being able to view your 2021 business plans in augmented reality to see if they will create the future that you seek. If you could, would you?
When retailers like IKEA augment reality on their app so you can see a yellow armchair in your living room, their focus is less about the armchair and more about helping you imagine the world you will create in your home — the friends you will gather together, the sense of peace you will have from quietly meditating in the chair, the happiness its colour will bring to your day.
Imagine the difference it would make if you could use augmented reality to see if your vision of change, your strategy and the accompanying actions that you have planned for your business will create the commercial results, culture, and employee satisfaction that you seek within your organisation.
Let’s look at an example.
Currently, retailers in Australia are moving to expand their online presence building from the significant change in customer behaviour during COVID. Some have strategies to achieve this by attracting and retaining the pick of employees recently outplaced who can radically improve online merchandising, forecast buying trends etc. To retain these employees, detailed business plans include enhancing interactions with employees to successfully integrate them and safeguard their satisfaction. To achieve this, time will be spent clarifying the internal message to create an integrated culture, improving personal and team communication through online meeting platforms, using the HRIS to acknowledge birthdays and more.
There is however a huge risk in these planned actions because how will you know that these solutions will hit their target in the way that you want, to create the future you seek until they have been implemented?
There is a missing step that we need to add to the change process. The step of augmenting the reality of your organisation to see if your change plans are more likely to create the future you seek. There are ways of having conversations that add this next dimension to change plans before you take the commercial risk.
With these conversations you won’t just have a plan and a set of activities. Instead, you will walk around the future that you seek, creating a rich picture of your solutions, enabling you to choose whether to move forward with certain solutions and how to move forward with the ones that fit. These conversations provide a powerful reality test of the impact your choices will have on your business, before you sign your name to them commercially.
Working this way you will soon discover that the choices you need materialise from these different conversations enabling you to change with ease.
So, looking ahead to 2021, let’s replace the yellow chair with your business plan and reality test your organisation’s future.
Carey Glass is an Organisational Psychologist and Management Consultant. She has built a career over 20 years spanning Europe and Australia working with teams and organisations who have got stuck or who want to progress quickly. An expert in change with ease, she co-edits an international journal devoted to transforming organisations. Her work in positive change has been cited by Harvard. Australian and European clients include ANZ, Salvation Army, PwC, NHS, Deloitte, the Co-operative Group, Oetker, Countrywide Plc.
“Carey’s approach made all the difference and completely transformed the culture of the team and enabled them to change. We were trying to face up to change and deal with it, but it was a bit nebulous. I didn’t want to work from top-down theories and models of organisational change, because making them real is so difficult. I was interested in the discussion we’d had about how we could create change realistically and with more impact and I was keen to take that next step. We’ve moved more in the right direction and it’s noticeable. We’ve been able to absorb great volumes of work and people are flexible. Without that it would be impossible to adapt to our new world.”
Jeremy Bloom, Director Major Projects North, Highways England
