What Game of Thrones can teach us about agility, growth and competition

Despite pertaining to the normally quite niche genre of fantasy, Game of Thrones has proven to be popular amongst a remarkably wide and diverse audience. One of the main reasons behind the show’s widespread appeal is its masterful relatability of fantastical elements to the real world, notably: chaos facilitating changes in power; building alliances and beating competitors; and preparing for uncertainty when the seasons inevitably change. From the perspective business world, there are lessons to be learned: agility, growth and competitiveness are essential for survival.

Winter is coming…

…or in other words, disruptive technologies (such as cloud, automation and AI/ML) will (continue to) drive rapid change in the business world, making the future less certain. This is helping to level the playing field in terms of business scale: SMEs and start-ups can leverage the speed and ease of implementing new technologies while larger enterprises are held back by footprint, complex networks of IT dependencies and legacy business applications. Larger enterprises may have armies of IT staff at their disposal to defend systems from disruption, but these could well be limiting organisations looking for new paths to tread.

With the winds shifting in favour of the small and agile, enterprises must learn to be able to move at start-up speed lest they lose out to a better-adapted competitor. Transformation does not need to occur overnight, and individual business units should be assessed and prioritised in order of dependency and cost. Game of Thrones teaches us that we must avoid relying on old methods to work in the present, which may, in fact, result in the sacrifice of crucial assets in the process. An incremental approach helps to ensure transformation remains outcome-driven, and enables leaders of digital change to develop iteratively, checking their assumptions at every step.

Chaos isn't a pit. Chaos is a ladder

As kingdoms rise and fall, from the ensuing chaos emerges opportunities for the less advantaged to get ahead. The dawn of the age of cloud and the disruption it has brought is one such example of this. While agile, cloud-native start-ups speed ahead by quickly adapting to customer needs via platform-based business models, industry incumbents are struggling as a direct result of their scale, weighed down with networks of nebulous interdependencies and legacy IT. Adding to the chaos is the sheer amount of choices businesses face when evaluating cloud options, including provider, on-prem vs. hosted and a multitude of ancillary choices.

With disruption on the horizon, it can be easy for traditional businesses to feel powerless, however, as Game of Thrones tell us, "power resides where it is believed it resides.” No one holds a monopoly on innovation, and businesses of all sizes can ensure they have the right tools to exploit chaos by basing their choice on that which empowers their staff. Solutions should be picked based on how well they get your team to do what they do best: build products and features that matter to your customers. Therefore, staff must be involved in the decision-making process to ensure they have everything they need to deliver value to end-users. Collaboration is key to empowering staff to face the myriad challenges presented by the chaos of digital transformation, providing the chance to set a business up with the right technical foundation for the future.

SEE ALSO: 

• World Productivity Day: Tech tips for productivity leaders

• This Week: Slack market cap rockets to $20bn, an all time Wall Street high, the foldable phone future

• Leesman: Creating the elite workplace

• Click here to read the June issue of Business Chief US

Fire cannot kill a dragon

With immediate brand recognition boosting user trust in new solutions, fortress-like financial security and the lion’s share of the skills talent pool, industry incumbents and cloud hyper-scalers may seem like the ultimate survivalists when it comes to the highly-competitive enterprise IT industry. However, even dragons have their weaknesses. For too long, prospective competitors have failed to dethrone the industry leaders as a result of trying to fight fire with fire. In today’s competitive landscape, agility, innovation and uniqueness go much further than brute force when it comes to disrupting the market, while precise, targeted execution can help eliminate risk, identify new areas of growth, and crucially, gain a key advantage over the fire-breathing competition.

Often, key advantages can be evinced out of relationship-building and partnerships. However, on the same token, you should never wager all resources upon the reliability of a single individual, and always be careful who you trust. Everyone has his or her own vision for how a strategy should be executed upon, a factor which is exacerbated by closed-off management structures, siloed teams and rigid hierarchy throughout the organisation. Success can be found in the least likely of places by looking inward, not upward. Leverage the power of the people internally and collaborate in order to identify a new way to move forward. At the same time, question convictions and maintain a healthy scepticism of those of peers to make sure to stay on track when a breakthrough is on the horizon.

Make a plan before you go to war

Whether it's enhancing security or crafting roadmaps, companies must have a sense of what they want to accomplish before they go off and start changing things. For security, carry out a realistic risk assessment: Identify the most crucial corporate assets, their core security requirements and why they matter to the business, while continuously validating assumptions. For roadmaps, take an iterative approach to execution to make sure the team remains outcome-driven; test products out in the field, then evaluate, adapt and test again. The more experience an organisation has in identifying new risks and working out ways to limit them, the more resilient it will be when it matters most.  

Technology is daring and changes frequently. As the winds of digital transformation have shifted towards the cloud, make sure platforms are flexible to take advantage of new opportunities and tools, and that the approach is holistically focused on driving business value. Remember, when you play the Game of Thrones, you win, or you die. The same can be said for enterprises today that fail to compete and grow. In time, they will simply cease to exist.