How can you future-proof your company culture?

Open to opportunity

In 1975, an electrical engineer called Steve Sasson built the world’s first digital camera. It was cobbled together from spare parts, weighed 3.5 kilos and looked like a toaster. But it worked. Excited, he took it to his bosses and tried to get them to produce it. But they weren’t interested. They told him to forget it. Worried it might cannibalise sales of their current products, they buried it. Sasson’s company? Kodak. An organisation that, a few years later, would be ‘surprised’ by the trend for digital; wouldn’t manage to release its own commercial digital camera until 1995; and whose inability to transition to the new medium contributed significantly to its bankruptcy in 2012.

Blockbuster is another company regularly held up as one that couldn’t see the future coming. Yet like Kodak, they too were given a clear preview of the future. They just didn’t, or couldn’t, accept it. In 2000, Netflix’s founders visited Blockbuster’s headquarters to ask them to invest in the company. According to Netflix co-founder Marc Randolph, Blockbuster CEO John Antioco almost laughed when they told him they believed their company was worth $50 million, and he sent them on their way. He said he saw their online model as a tiny, unsustainable “niche business” and dismissed excitement around the Internet as being “completely overblown.” The result? Blockbuster were blindsided by the success of online and streaming and declared bankruptcy in 2010. Today Netflix is worth almost $350 billion.

A failure of culture

With hindsight it’s easy to point the finger at individuals for such failings. But actually in neither case was it down to one person’s myopia. It was an endemic failure of the company’s culture and organisation. And indeed of corporate cultures and organisations in general.

Blockbuster and Kodak didn’t die off because they didn’t see the future. They died off because they didn’t believe it. Or, more accurately perhaps, there was no reason for them to believe it. Everything they had learned, every system the company had in place said: keep on keeping on, the old ways are fine, don’t rock the boat. Even if those execs had a nagging feeling the challengers might be right, there was no incentive for them to take a chance.

Taking a different path

Clearly, it’s not enough to be told what the future holds. Companies require the right culture, and leaders the right mindset, to identify and exploit any new opportunity. You need to be open to what you’re being told, and ready to embrace and exploit the possibilities it offers. And that’s where a lot of otherwise strategically-smart companies fall short.

Today we’re constantly being told that we’re in a ‘new abnormal’. A world where the levels of volatility and uncertainty are so obvious they’ve become a cliche. “The only certainty is uncertainty” (insert your own version). And most of us accept it, at least on a surface level. Even the most intransigent business leaders have stopped saying: “we’ll do X when things get back to normal”. We also know that, in order to succeed in this new world we’re going to have to start doing things differently. The problem is, the different things we need to do can often feel counter-intuitive and counter to the tenets of our organisation. In fact, they’re often the complete opposite of what we’re used to doing.

Doing difficult things

So what is it we’ll need to do differently tomorrow? And why might it be hard to embrace? Well, in volatile times, disruptive events occur quicker and with less warning. To succeed, companies often need to respond immediately. It’s a bit like being in a giant game of Supermarket Sweep. The C-Suite is pushing the cart as fast as it will go but, with little knowledge of where the highest value items are, they’re having to make snap decisions to grab what they think is high value, before it’s time to move onto the next aisle. They don’t have the luxury of waiting for all the facts or the perfect scenario, before being forced to make what could be a vital decision.

But such a quick fire, ‘on the fly’ approach goes against traditional strategic thinking. It also goes against most companies’ corporate guidelines, formal or informal, with management penalised more for wrong decisions than for no decisions.

Smart but speedy decision making will also require decentralisation. According to a weighty study from McKinsey, in today’s landscape an open and adaptive management style is almost twice as likely to achieve above-average financial performance than a traditional, individualistic one. Leaders will need to listen to a diverse range of opinions and reward the people who challenge them. In the words of Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, they’ll have to shift from being a know-it-all leader to a learn-it-all one. Tomorrow’s company will also need to be more customer-led, tracking changes in consumer-sentiment in order to refine strategy.

Again, though, all this goes against much learning and company practice, where managers are taught to come across as strong and decisive. To push through their own big decisions without worrying about the comments of their team. And the comments of their customers? Well, many senior leaders have grown up thinking they’d all just ask for “a faster horse”.

It’s not just our training that stops us, it’s also our anxiety. Look at me. Up until last year, I was still clinging to the safety of what I’d been doing for years: giving talks about specific future trends. It took me many months to accept that I had to stop and instead say “I don’t know what’s going to happen: but I can help you prepare for whatever comes.” We all love the safety of what we’ve grown used to: our spreadsheets, our targets, our five-year plans. It’s hard to let go. Especially those of us in leadership roles. It takes extraordinary courage to abandon an approach that’s helped you get to where you are. Yet, it’s dangerous to tread water when a five-year plan in 2026 can read less like a business manual and more like science-fiction. Because report after report shows that, in tomorrow’s uncertain world, competitive advantage will belong to the organisations that can, and do, pivot fastest and most effectively.

A new way forward

To be genuinely ready for uncertainty requires a fundamental shift. It means changing the way we our teams think, not just when change hits but constantly. We need to create a culture that encourages new ways of thinking. That doesn’t try to stifle new ideas to maintain the status quo. That gives ourselves and our teams the time, skills and encouragement to change.

A more detailed set of recommendations must wait for another article, but I’ll suggest a few pointers.

We’ll need to add new metrics for success, such as flexibility and innovation. To ensure an innovative mindset, we’ll have to reward trying as well as achieving. Set up systems that reward and incentivise risk and agility not just compliance and consistency. We’ll need to build employees’ trust so that, when we ask them to pivot, they’ll believe in us enough to do so. To do that, we should involve staff more in the decision-making process: cultivating psychological safety and creating change ambassadors. Empower front-line management to make high-stakes decisions without waiting weeks for approval. Reduce closely guarded silos by creating more autonomous project teams and rewriting organisation charts.

We must also challenge our own biases: invite dissenting voices to the boardroom to challenge baseline assumptions. We’ll need to practice Adaptive Management: reducing the number of static, traditional long-term plans and treating decisions as experiments that require monitoring, evaluating and adjusting. It’ll be essential too to identify and maintain a clear strategic direction: where we’re going and what we stand for. Every disruption and response can then be measured against that. It’s like when you’re surfing: you need to duck or sway when each wave hits, but you’ll never succeed unless your core’s strong.

Individually, none of these processes are new. Several of them will be familiar as part of change management programmes. The trick is to combine and interweave them, ensuring they’re embedded in a company’s day to day organisation, not forgotten after the next quarterly earnings meeting.

Doing beats knowing

At the end of the day, it’s not the ‘knowing’ that drives success in disruptive times, it’s the ‘doing’. Look at Kodak and Blockbuster. Two multi-million dollar enterprises who filed for bankruptcy when change overtook them. Not because they didn’t see those changes coming. They were presented to them clearly in prototype and Powerpoint form. But because the company, like so many others, was organised to ignore them.

And that’s the lesson to learn. It’s not enough to ‘know’ what changes the future holds. We need to shift our attitudes so we can embrace those changes. To build a change-friendly culture and organisation before we attempt to make those difficult decisions.

Because if we hang on to the past, we’ll miss the chance to grab hold of the future. And someone else will get there first.

As Netflix’s Marc Randolph says: “The most important lesson, a lesson that Blockbuster learned too late, is simply this: ‘If you are unwilling to disrupt yourself, there will always be someone willing to disrupt your business for you.’”