06 Jul Military tactics: how businesses can prepare for ‘Freedom Day’
Over the course of the last 18 months, business leaders have been forced to act urgently in moments of crisis. Now, with Prime Minister Boris Johnson claiming he is confident that the country can “get back to life as close to it was before Covid”, pressure is building amongst business leaders to prepare for ‘Freedom Day’.
Yet after months of national lockdowns and varying levels of restrictions, many firms are questioning the best route to see their organisations through the upcoming change. Today’s business environments are changing rapidly. As such, business strategy allows leaders to deal with uncertainty in a way that allows firms to continue to function and stay true to their course. When an environment is relatively stable, all that is needed is a plan; it is the presence of uncertainty that necessitates strategy.
Gareth Tennant’s experience working in complex environments for the British Army, and his commercial methodologies for dealing with uncertainty in the marketplace, are more relevant than ever to today’s and tomorrow’s business leaders. Using his military background to support firms in the art of decision making in complex environments and adapting as threats change, Gareth demonstrates that these concepts can be grounded into a real-world context, helping organisations with tomorrows unprecedented challenges.
Gareth Tennant – partner at Future Strategy Club – discusses how business leaders can thrive post-pandemic:
“We’re all now facing a situation where the environment we’re operating in, no matter what sector you’re in, is dynamic. As things are changing faster than any of us can keep up with, let alone control, being organised and disciplined is a must. The military is quite comfortable with dealing with complexity – that is, within
the bounds of winning and losing. For thousands of years, discipline and volume of forces was all that mattered; a philosophy that still underpins a lot of our modern business and organisational thinking. As warfare became less about mass and more about manoeuvre, so too did military command philosophy.
Nowadays in both business and war, agility trumps sheer size. But as organisations grow in terms of scale and complexity, leaders must be able to effectively maintain control whilst allowing on-the-ground teams to make decisions quickly enough to respond to changes in the operating environment.”
