How entrepreneurs can cope with change by creating an ecosystem of resilience

If an organization is built like a rainforest ecosystem, it should already have developed internal resilience that enables it to survive even unexpected events, including the firing of the CEO and other executives by the board of directors.

This is exactly what happened at one of my previous firms when the board of a medical clinic asked me to take over as interim CEO and stop the doctors and nurses from walking out the door en masse. My job was to revive bonds of trust between management and staff that enables ecosystems to flourish.

Physicians and nurses are highly employable, so when faced with the uncertainty of losing their CEO in one fell swoop, there was little to stop them. As a senior director helping to support and manage HR departments in over 50 clinics, I used to be ideally placed to assist, since our immediate concern was retaining our staff.

I showed everyone how essential they were to the clinic and the community they served. In turn, I asked the board to step back while I rebuilt those relationships. Throughout this nine-month process, I used to be very aware of our interdependence. Ecosystems are built on teams that rely on each other, and that’s a powerful analogy for effective change management. After all, there’s no such thing as a silo in the rainforest.

Who are you? The ocean or the forest?

At my current company, we recently introduced the idea of ​​an ecosystem with a video presentation about the relationships between our departments at our all-hands meeting — and it was a real hit. Our marketing team even used this analogy externally to indicate the different touchpoints in the customer journey and how they support each other.

People were really excited when they saw their departments as representing the earth (HR), ocean (Technology), plains (Marketing) and mountains (Corporate Sales). There was a lot of laughter when Customer Service saw itself as a jungle, with the chaos of not knowing what would occur next with the calls they were receiving.

We really wanted to emphasise that in order to thrive, each individual must work together, connect with others, and build lasting bonds. Similarly, cultivating that interdependence can build resilience. If you look at a rainforest, it continues to thrive even when it is being destroyed because it is we all the time rebuild ourselves from the insideLikewise, as a company grows, departments can turn out to be stretched thin, but seeing each other as interdependent allows us to collectively address the biggest disruptor in the ecosystem—change.

The “Why” Behind Change Management

Nothing happens in isolation inside an ecosystem. When one department must make a significant change, we gather all the key stakeholders in a room to grasp how it would impact all the other departments. If it’s a tough task for that department, we reach out to other members of the ecosystem to support the change.

HR’s role as a stakeholder is to offer an explanation of the “why” of change. I’ve seen change management fail when this doesn’t occur. While our functions, strategic plan, and quarterly goals could also be well-established, people still must know how their actions are resulting in the desired business outcomes—otherwise they feel disconnected from the ecosystem.

We deliver wellness software solutions, and tight alignment between marketing, technology, sales, support, and HR is essential to delivering real value to customers. If our “why” is to assist solopreneurs, mid-market businesses, and enterprises, the people on the ground will buy in when they realize that customers can take their advice as gospel. This positive motivation then flows through the entire ecosystem.

Best Practices Benchmarking

Once HR has discovered the “why” of the change, that you must ask if more resources, staffing, and training are needed before it can be executed. But ecosystems are alive, and HR doesn’t necessarily have to look outside the company. We partnered with LinkedIn’s AI solution to synthesize a person’s experience, education, goals, and job description to disclose our “hidden workforce.” Often, we discover that there’s already someone in the ecosystem with the skill set we’d like.

Next, that you must benchmark best practices. This falls into three categories:

• If you have made these types of changes before, document them and then work to refine the process to do it even higher.
• If you’ve failed in the past, work out what went incorrect and do a root cause evaluation so you don’t fall into the same trap. (For example, just because you once spent $1 million on marketing and gained 10,000 latest customers doesn’t mean that spending $2 million will double your profit.)
• If this is a completely latest change, compare it to other organizations that have implemented it before.

Be sure to incorporate all relevant stakeholders in the benchmarking. Just as fires, droughts, and logging can destroy an ecosystem, external pressures can also expose any discrepancies between departments and functions. All components must work harmoniously together for the ecosystem to leverage change to its advantage.

Adaptation and co-development

There are two types of change management: change we can plan and control, and change we must implement quickly, sometimes in response to a crisis. When management fired the C-suite from my previous position, I discovered that even desperate situations can be salvaged, and prevention is a much higher approach.

An ecosystem is a good analogy for keeping teams connected and fostering a culture of community where no one operates in isolation.

As our Customer Experience representative (representing the underground layer in our ecosystem) says in the video, “We rely heavily on our Customer Success, Marketing, Engineering, and all key stakeholders to continually improve our solutions through an iterative and user-centric approach.” When everyone is aware of their impact, organizations are in the best position to adapt to changes in their thriving ecosystem.