Turning Disruption
into Opportunity

If disruption is constant, then organizations can’t stop to make a plan each time they’re faced with a new crisis. Instead, they must be resilient in the face of whatever arises. That might sound impossible, but effective leaders build agility into the fabric of their organizations. Organizational agility is the ability to respond to change quickly, inexpensively, creatively, and at low risk.

There are several barriers to building an agile and resilient organization. First is mindset: leaders are often afraid to change direction because it makes them seem indecisive. Or it will seem like their original direction was mistaken. But resilience is about pivoting as necessary to accommodate change. Change is not something to be feared; resilient leaders embrace it.

A second barrier is that building agility requires investment, but its return might not be obvious. It is impossible to project a concrete ROI for an investment in agility, because no one knows exactly what the agility will be used for. That makes it difficult for organizations to prioritize it alongside other investments that seem to offer more concrete returns. The return on agility is better seen as risk reduction or the creation of financial options. In any case, the organization must find a way to assign business value to increasing its resilience.

The third barrier is bureaucratic controls that inhibit agility. Successful organizations are doing something right. Over time, their way of doing things gets locked in; whenever the company diverges from it or whenever a problem arises, new controls are added to ensure it never happens again. Controls eventually accumulate and slow the company down. They also stifle innovation. To be resilient, an organization must find ways to make its bureaucracy leaner and less coercive.

Given the centrality of technology to business today, business resilience depends on technological resilience. The cloud is an essential tool for building a resilient technology architecture. AWS is designed from the ground up for security and resilience, with 32 independent geographical regions worldwide. Every region contains at least three availability zones separated by a meaningful distance, each consisting of one or more data centers. AWS meets the resilience needs of Amazon.com, many of the world’s largest financial institutions and market hubs, and sensitive government agencies.

Even a resilient organization can be dragged in one direction and then another as it responds to disruptions. As it exercises its resilience, it must maintain a consistent vision, a north star that unifies its activities in its path forward. It must work with purpose.

Purpose is what makes each employee’s role more than just a job description, but rather a part in a larger vision. It empowers and motivates them. Organizational purpose aligns the activities across the firm and lets leaders decentralize authority and empower teams. It prevents the organization from stabbing out blindly in new directions when its business is threatened and helps prioritize activities.

Today, an organization’s purpose must include its societal role. Companies are among the planet’s stewards and mentors to present and future workers. Employees and customers want to know how the company is fulfilling those obligations. These expectations should not be seen as a burden, but rather a part of the company’s mission. They help direct the organization in tuning its governance, building resilience, and serving customers the way they want to be served. Reducing waste helps the planet and makes for a more efficient company; the S&P 500 ESG index outperformed the overall S&P 500 and suffered fewer losses during the pandemic.

In 2019 AWS launched its Climate Pledge, a promise to meet the Paris Accords’ goals ten years early, in 2040. It’s been joined in this pledge by more than 300 businesses across 51 industries and 29 countries. Renewable energy will power AWS data centers 100% by 2025. By 2030, those data centers will return more water to the environment than they use. For AWS customers, moving workloads to the cloud cuts their carbon footprint by over 80%. AWS customers can use the cloud to be better environmental stewards across their entire businesses: some use the cloud to route their vehicle fleets more efficiently to save fuel, some to optimize the heating and air conditioning in their buildings.

In a time of continuous disruption, working with purpose is essential for maintaining a consistent direction and for driving a company forward even while it’s playing defense. It joins resilience by design as a crucial pillar for leadership in today’s economy. But a company must still find ways to grow and to better accomplish its mission. That’s the intent of pillar three: Growth Through Innovation.

Disruption creates opportunity; continuous disruption continuously creates opportunities. Successful businesses will seize these opportunities to drive results. Some opportunities might suggest new product lines – big picture innovation – but some might lead to more subtle breakthroughs, like opportunities to streamline processes and cut costs as new technologies emerge. This suggests that successful companies should make continuous innovation part of their everyday business. They must continually sense opportunities, devise innovative ways to respond, and get those innovations into production. Most companies are not especially good at this.

Leaders sometimes mistakenly believe that increasing innovation requires getting employees to have more ideas. The truth is that employees probably have good ideas already. Employees directly in contact with customers often have good ideas about what will delight those customers, and those employees facing inefficient internal processes already know how to improve them. The problem is usually in turning those ideas into reality. Because innovation is risky, organizations have inadvertently become good at shutting it down. New ideas are questioned and their inventors face organizational barriers and skeptical decision-makers.

The best way to increase innovation, then, is to reduce its risk. This is where the cloud shines. Any innovation that needs technical support – and virtually all do – can be tested and cultivated in the cloud, where infrastructure can be provisioned quickly, used at low volume and therefore low cost until an idea has proven itself, and only scaled up as its success is demonstrated, or abandoned if the idea is unsuccessful. The benefit goes well beyond infrastructure – AWS offers over 200 high-level building block services on a pay-as-you-go basis, including analytics, virtual reality, augmented reality, edge computing and IoT sensors, and – most importantly today – machine learning.

Machine learning opens whole new categories of business problems to solutions – problems that would have been too difficult using conventional programming approaches but are easily amenable to ML. Previously, business innovations involving machine learning were risky – you’d have to hire PhDs in machine learning, finance the expensive computers they’d need, and wait years while they built their models before you could see if results would follow. Today, AWS offers pre-trained machine learning models and tools for easily building your own, again on a pay-as-you-go basis. You can feel free to experiment without fear of failure.

That is the key to growing through innovation – reducing risk and then trying and refining ideas. With a resilient infrastructure, a purpose to guide innovation, and the tools for innovating successfully, businesses can keep growing by seizing the opportunities disruption presents.