Supporting Discontinuous Change

The current retail marketplace experience of discontinuous change causing disruption and in some cases extreme challenges to react should not be a surprise to anyone. In fact, I think the big surprise is the continued dependence of major retailers on historical reactions such as cutting costs to react to the market disruption. This type of marketplace disruption requires a new way of reacting and not just retrenching into more of the same tactics used during market downturns. We are not experiencing a downturn in the market, we are experience an overhaul of the market shopping and purchasing while the market is expanding. These are the most difficult conditions to address and requires investment in rebuilding the retailer business model.





The level of discontinuous change in the retail marketplace has disrupted this marketplace demanding of participants a transparent and cohesive shopping and purchasing experience. The waves of demands have not given the large legacy retailers much of a chance to catch up with the demands and the bad news is that these waves of demands and change will only increase in velocity and impact as they build on the previous changes. This requires a new paradigm from the retail marketplace of participants and partners to support both the level and velocity of the change.





This paradigm change requires a focus on increased and improved capabilities to sense change and, probably most important, a new increased focus on experimentation, especially in meeting change. What has become abundantly clear though is that this new paradigm requires a high level of collaboration across not only partners but consumers as well. This is requires as an integrated plan and partnerships to support not only the necessary activities and practices to sense change, it is also required to support the reaction to the change. Every single change and and especially change leading to disruption requires requires a coordinated response across a multitude of partner to react and support the demands.





In looking back and looking around I do not really see any marketplace disruption that required only one organization to drive, yes there was one leader that recognized the opportunity for change and market disruption, however, that leader then partnered with other participants to support and enable the disruption. The key issue that is see that absolutely must be overcome in order to survive is supporting a robust collaboration model and unfortunately this is the one issue that requires a culture change in the large legacy retailers to enact. In looking around I see many companies that speak about the importance of collaboration and are even taking steps to improve collaboration with their external partners, the issue that I see though is that many of the same larger legacy retailers are still hung up in internal silos that are slowing change through the controls to maintain these silos.





In order to truly support the discontinuous change and the market disruption that will only increase in velocity I believe that the market must create chief collaboration officer that is empowered to seek out and expand collaboration across internal silos while also seeking out and expanding collaboration across their market partners. This is a culture change that will require support of the organization leadership and the best way to broadcast the support and importance is through the creation of a chief collaboration officer that is empowered to make change. This chief collaboration officer will be charged with sensing and supporting the change and disruption in the marketplace and this officer will also be charged with the authority to experiment and the encouragement to fail.