External Market Drivers and Disruptors Course

Overview

The only thing constant is change. Today, this constant change seems to be happening faster than ever before, and organizations must be prepared to adapt and change just as fast. The days of thoroughly strategizing and long-term planning—where leaders could once take a year or more to pivot a company’s direction – are ending. Organizations and their leaders must be prepared to quickly change course through open system strategy, in which they can quickly create strategies based on shifting needs and preferences.

This course in External Market Drivers & Disruptors takes a deep dive into various disruptors and drivers of change, provides the tools and tactics for you to identify and assess the impact of these drivers and disruptors on your organization and your customers, and create the best change strategy for a competitive advantage.

By focusing on four primary areas, this course will help you to better understand the speed of change happening in the world today and its impact, apply methods to identify and assess key change indicators and utilize these to develop open systems strategies to help avoid disruption and proactively embrace change, and ultimately leverage drivers of change to your advantage by aligning your organization’s change strategy. 

What You’ll Learn

Understanding the Speed of Change

• Establish the current context for the ever-changing business marketplace
• Explore how factors such as demographics, climate change, pandemic-altered business models and supply chains, Industry 4.0, and geo-political events are all drivers accelerating the rate of change
• Understand the importance of recognizing and assessing your response to change and learn to mitigate risk

Key Strategic Drivers for the Rate of Change

• Assess the drivers of change (introduced in module 1) that your organization and/or functional area is most vulnerable to
• Learn to proactively leverage the opportunities created by these drivers through various tools and best practices, such as competitor analysis and mapping the complete product lifecycle
• Grasp and track the business environment you’re operating in through the principles of an external environmental analysis
• Gain steps for effectively leading change through Kotter’s strategic model

Strategies to Avoid Disruption and Embrace Change

• Utilize open systems strategy to help your organization quickly re-strategize based on external drivers and disruptors
• Understand the right questions to ask to develop and test the efficiency and effectiveness of open systems strategy to your organization
• Recognize the dangers of ignoring external drivers and disruptors
• Develop and apply tools to overcome biases and blind spots to diagnose threats and the strategies to avoid them

Selecting the Best Change Strategy for Your Organization

• Apply the tools, methods and best practices learned in the previous module to develop your unique open system strategy
• Communicate your strategy for organizational buy-in and alignment
• Predict and plan for the disruptors of the future

Who Should Register

• New senior managers needing to go beyond their functional area skills to applying strategic thinking skills as they develop departmental and organization-wide strategies in a senior leadership position.
• First-line managers and middle managers tasked with greater departmental strategic responsibility and needing a deeper understanding of how to combine macro-strategy, micro-strategy, and competitive strategy within their department and align with the organization’s overall strategy, vision and goals.
• Senior-level executives and people leaders who are looking for more formal strategy development and change management education to build resiliency, agility and infuse new thinking within their teams and the organization overall.