Do you embrace change?

 Iam sure you have heard of the popular saying that goes “it is not the strongest or most intelligent of species that survives but the most adaptable.”

How adaptable are you in the workplace or in your business? Do you embrace change and go with the wind? Today, we want to focus our discussion on this topicIf you want to succeed sustainably, you need to be adaptable and you need to embrace change. You may try to block change, but like those before you, you will not achieve that goal. Change cannot be stopped. Change needs to be embraced. We need to be adaptable for us to embrace change, not once but always.

As a starting point, you need to understand the vision of your organisation or business—where your entity is going. Even that may change along the line and when the vision changes, you need to quickly detect and align with the new direction. This change can be due to changing environment, change in leadership or because of other factors. Regardless of the cause of the change, you need to adapt with the new direction.

Even priorities of your organisation or business will change with time. You need to embrace that. I remember some 10 years ago, when I was working in a pressurised environment. My team and I would draw up a list of our priorities for the day at 8 am. But our priorities would change so fast that at 11:30 am we would reconvene to re-prioritise our actions. Everyone in the team needed to have a very adaptable mind-set to avoid remaining behind.

Basically, you need to be regularly scanning the environment and reading the game always. It doesn’t matter what you like or wish, run with the change, follow the wind and do not block the flow of the game for you will not win. Rather, be adaptable for you to survive. Embrace change to remain relevant and impactful.

In fact, at advanced level, you should be the one initiating change. Read the trends and scan the environment to review your current realities. The output of that process should inform you on whether to stay the course or to change the direction, approach, team or other

Remember that 15 years ago, Nokia was dominating in terms of the brand of mobile handsets that we used. However, they did not read the changing needs of their customers and they did not read the changes that their competitor Samsung was bringing to the market and they lost the market dominance even the business ultimately. The reason is simple, they did not embrace change.

On the contrary, see on the local market how banks are innovating and changing to remain competitive and relevant. They have embraced technology to a great extent. They have adopted mobile money, which has been a great threat to their business. They even embrace village banking, which has been eating into their share of deposits. The banks know very well that “if you cannot beat them, you should join them.” That mantra is great for embracing change that is directly threatening the core of what you do.

The masters of change are prepared to even join forces with the opposition or competition to survive because they know the essence of change as ingredient for change.

Mobile operators are the same. In the past, they made a lot of money from people making phone calls and sending SMSes. With the advent of other calling tools like voice over Internet with the example of calling using WhatsApp or Facebook or Skype, mobile operators have lost some revenues made from calls. They have lost most of the money they used to make from SMSes as people now love to send messages via WhatsApp. What mobile operators did was not to try and change the behaviour of their customers, but to embrace the change and therefore, they have invested a lot in providing data services that enable the competing services like WhatsApp, Facebook and so on.

You too can survive change by embracing change. Therefore, be adaptable and embrace change so that you too can rise and shine