Managing Uncertainty: Strategies for Surviving and Thriving in Turbulent Times

Chapter 7

Predictive learning

The capability to sense, probe and analyse previously hidden patterns and trends in order to anticipate sudden or disruptive change

You have to get signals from the market beamed back to the organisation as purely as possible and try to keep those signals from being distorted.

Eric Beinhocker, The Origin of Wealth

ACCORDING TO RAINER FEURER, senior vice-president, corporate strategy and planning environment at BMW, the quality of any organisation’s strategy depends on the quality of knowledge it draws on (see Chapter 2). This in turn hinges on how effectively the process of knowledge gaining is managed in the organisation. Strategy formulation, Feurer stressed, must therefore be regarded as a constant learning process and the quality of strategy directly depends on the quality of an organisation’s cognitive and behavioural learning mechanisms.

For GlaxoSmithKline, learning about an uncertain environment is an unstructured and informal process that occurs when staff are naturally curious and inquiring. The company has a deep foundation of scientific inquiry, but it is critical that its staff look outside the organisation and tap into fresh ideas and perspectives. Adrian Rawcliffe explains:

I do think that there are organisational capabilities around business intelligence that one can point to, as well as companies with excellent and relevant “baked in” business intelligence. These companies have a systematic process. They have determined what things ...