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Over the course of the last 5 years – from Brexit to COVID-19 – business leaders have been forced to act urgently in moments of crisis. Yet with data from the Office for National Statistics revealing that more than 900,000 UK small businesses are current ‘at risk’ of failing, it is evident that many leaders’ current attempt to navigate these choppy waters is failing.
Currently, we are experiencing one of the most tumultuous times the business world has ever seen. As such, leaders are questioning the best route to see their organisations through the fog – and perhaps wondering how they can even make strategic decisions amidst such uncertainty.
Gareth Tennant, the former Head of Intelligence at the Royal Marines and an FSC Partner uses his military background to support every business leader in the art of decision making in complex environments and adapting as threats change. Using thought-provoking correlations between global security challenges and those faced by businesses in a highly de-centralised, complex and connected environment, 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 the striking correlations between global security challenges and those faced by businesses today:
“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.”
