Rapid and unpredictable change in the business environment creates plentiful opportunities – but seizing them requires a new approach to strategic planning, write Janka Krings-Klebe and Jörg Schreiner
How much of your organization’s strategy and leadership truly emerges from contextual dynamics, and how much is still defined by yesterday’s logic?
In uncertainty, strategy can no longer be an annual ritual tied to forecasts and five-year plans. Static playbooks are obsolete. The organizations that thrive are those that let go of the illusion of tight control.
In this environment, traditional approaches to strategy, governance and leadership are reaching their limits. The familiar tools of risk escalation, centralized orchestration of strategies, and incremental optimization of operations are ineffective when markets, technologies and opportunities are constantly changing. What, then, are the new demands on organizations facing such relentless dynamism? In a rapidly shifting landscape, strategy is defined by the ability to swiftly identify untapped and emerging opportunities and mobilize the appropriate capabilities to act on them.
This is not a one-time event but an ongoing conversation with the environment, using every new signal as input for the next strategic move. It places significant new demands on leadership and governance: both need to keep up with the growing business arena, ensuring that the organization not only preserves but increases its long-term potential in a dynamic world.
Embracing the unexpected
This shift from long-term planning to dynamic sensing and fast learning is at the heart of antifragility. Where legacy companies cling to stability, antifragile organizations embrace the unexpected, knowing that no plan survives first contact with a changing world. Their flexible structure is no accident: an antifragile organization is intentionally designed as a network of many small, autonomous units, each operating independently yet constantly exchanging information – especially about new business opportunities.
This architecture enables strategic flexibility. It pushes decisions and incentives out to the edges of the organization, where people are closest to customers, markets and emerging trends. Here, strategy is shaped and reshaped continuously by those who see opportunity first; not by annual reviews, but by a steady flow of signals, feedback and initiative.
Strategic flexibility, then, is about speed and maintaining a broad portfolio of experiments – options with limited downside and the potential for outsized upside. These strategic experiments are often small at the start, designed to be easy to stop if they fail, but fast to scale if they succeed. Failure is not stigmatized but actively expected, even welcomed as a source of rapid learning. At any given time some teams are in the early stages of exploration, others are probing new niches, and many more are operating at different levels of profitability or maturity.
Not all of them survive, and that’s good: the health of the ecosystem depends on continuous renewal, as unsuccessful ventures make way for new experiments, while the most profitable scale up quickly and draw others in. Successes that emerge are amplified while failing bets are quickly retired, their lessons captured and shared. This dynamic flow keeps the entire organization moving in sync with the market, always adjusting to new realities. The goal is not perfection or stability but hyper-adaptability – the ability to thrive in uncertainty by seizing new opportunities wherever and whenever they appear, often with several independent efforts running in parallel. This evolutionary approach turns uncertainty from a threat into a source of advantage, as the organization learns, adapts and grows stronger with every experiment.
The Singles’ Day shopping event
Nowhere is this dynamic, modular approach more visible than at Alibaba. The company’s business ecosystem operates as a living network of small, highly autonomous teams, each with the freedom to pursue new opportunities, but always in close communication with the broader organization. These teams are modular by design, able to combine their strengths or reconfigure instantly to tackle bigger challenges. When a new opportunity or market shift appears, teams don’t wait for direction from above: they join forces, swarm the challenge, and dissolve or regroup as soon as the situation changes. This means Alibaba never loses its strategic momentum.
Every year, this adaptability is put to the ultimate test during Singles’ Day, China’s antidote to Valentine’s Day – an unofficial celebration for people who are not in a relationship. Marked on 11 November, it has become a massive, high-velocity e-commerce event – the largest single shopping day in the world.
In the weeks leading up to the event, Alibaba’s network shifts into high gear. Some teams explore new sales concepts, others invent fresh digital experiences, and still others work with external partners to secure supply or launch joint ventures. As customer data and market signals pour in, teams rapidly re-form, integrating new expertise or dissolving if their experiments stall. During the event itself, new needs or problems can trigger the instant creation of a cross-functional team that solves an issue in real time or jumps on an emerging opportunity – sometimes within hours or even minutes. Throughout, information flows freely: every team acts as a sensor, scout and innovator, constantly exchanging insights and feedback across the network.
This relentless, real time coordination allows Alibaba to deliver record-breaking sales and to turn each Singles’ Day into a vast laboratory. Dozens of business models, marketing ideas and digital products are tested, amplified, or quickly abandoned. No centralized plan could ever predict the volume, pace or diversity of what emerges. What matters is that the entire ecosystem is always aligned with customer needs, able to seize and create opportunities as soon as they surface.
Alibaba’s example brings us back to the opening question: how much of your organization’s leadership truly emerges from context and how much is still defined by yesterday’s logic? In a dynamic environment, strategy must focus on quickly recognizing and developing a multitude of untapped and emergent opportunities. It demands a fundamental shift in both leadership and governance, both of which must continuously adapt to match the expanding space for innovation.
Janka Krings-Klebe and Jörg Schreiner are the co-aithors of The Antifragile Organization: From Hierarchies to Ecosystems (LID Publishing).
