Organisational reinvention has been going on all around us – sudden, and often unplanned.

During 2020, like many people, I bought a take-away meal from a hotel, watched a play filmed in the actor’s living room, and joined a choir full of singers who had never met each other. Creative workshops which used to be run for small groups of paying participants became virtual and temporarily free, while pubs briefly became retailers to get rid of their stock before lockdown. 

There is more reinvention to come in 2021, now planned more carefully to accommodate the medium and long-term effects of the pandemic. Consumer buying patterns have changed, and companies will need to cope with new economic circumstances. 

Organisations will also have to adapt to the alterations in some basic assumptions about how they operate: for example, how will leaders lead if they only see their teams face-to-face once a month? If employees only intermittently come to the office, how will important but informal organisational learning happen? There’s work to be done for strategy teams inside organisations to consider a range of scenarios and devise options for how they might respond.

The challenge and opportunity for individuals

This reinvention challenge faces each of us as individuals, too.  Although the world of work has been steadily changing over the last decade, 2020 saw radical and rapid shifts, and some of these are likely to be permanent.

But our reinvention challenge is not just about responding to external factors. Experiencing the pressures of lockdown constraints, many people reported that they were starting to think differently about their work, about why they work, and how and where they want to work in future. 

In an online webinar for alumnae of the Women Transforming Leadership programme in April 2020, early in the pandemic, many women were already talking about viewing their working lives very differently, and those conversations have continued in our online development programmes. In December, we asked over 100 participants who were about to graduate from our online Women’s Leadership Development Programme what their New Year’s resolution for 2021 might be. 

In reply, they talked about wanting to work differently: finding new roles, joining industry networks to broaden their perspective, or collaborating more closely with their peers to build and sustain confidence. 

They talked about the changes they wanted to make with a sense that now is the time to make them, while so much else is changing.