Not long ago I read a phrase in a Financial Times article that I couldn't get out of my head: "those who are a step behind in understanding the disruptive power of innovation will find it increasingly difficult to catch up. Not impossible. But increasingly difficult. And the gap grows every month."
What interests me about that phrase isn't the warning itself, which by now we've all heard at some conference. What interests me is what it implies for organizations that are today in the middle of a transformation process: the time lost managing change poorly is not neutral time. It's time during which the distance from those managing it well grows larger.
According to the World Economic Forum, business leaders project that nearly 44% of the skills required of workers will undergo significant changes over the next five years. This isn't an apocalyptic prediction. It's a description of what's already happening in many organizations — it just doesn't have a name in the org charts yet.
Creative thinking is gaining importance faster than analytical thinking. Technological literacy is the third fastest-growing core competency. And in the realm of attitudes, curiosity and continuous learning, resilience and agility are topping the list.
None of this is surprising in the abstract. What's surprising is the gap between what organizations say they value and what they actually train, measure and recognize. In most of the companies we work with, evaluation systems still measure efficiency on known tasks. The ability to adapt to unknown tasks — which is exactly what the market will demand — rarely has its own indicator.
That has concrete consequences. An organization can have brilliant talent with a low adaptability coefficient and not know it until change arrives and the response falls short of expectations.
Until recently, understanding how areas within an organization actually interact — or how the departure of a key person affects their team's ecosystem — depended on leaders' intuition or climate surveys that arrived late and said what people thought they should say.
Today, through people analytics powered by next-generation tools, it's possible to understand employees' propensity to adopt change, analyze their influence networks, simulate the impact of specific decisions, and gain a detailed and precise understanding of organizational behavior variables.
For example, if it's detected that a team operates in isolation and has low readiness for change, that finding no longer depends on the manager's perception. It can be seen visually, backed by data, along with the connections that team does or doesn't have with the rest of the organization. This allows for more targeted corrective action with greater impact, instead of generic interventions that don't reach the real problem.
And there's something the data reveals with a clarity the human eye rarely achieves: the most effective change agents aren't always the most visible or the most senior. They're the ones who combine technical capability with real influence within the organization's informal networks. Identifying those people with data — rather than with intention — completely changes the adoption strategy.
It's not whether it's going to change. Because it will. The market changes it, technology changes it, talent changes it. The real question is whether that change will happen by design or by collapse.
And for it to happen by design, something more than methodology and good intentions is needed: the ability to read the organization with the same precision with which the market is read. To know where the resistance points are before they stall the project. To identify who to involve first. To measure whether the effort is working or whether the course needs to be adjusted.
In a world where the only constant is change, the ability to manage and anticipate it is not a secondary competitive advantage. It's the one that decides who stays relevant.
By Irene Marqués, Partner at Olivia Mexico.