You have said the global pandemic teaches us that “change is not a project with a beginning and an end”. What is it, then?
If you look back at the 20th century, change was relatively rare. We had some massive shakeups in the forms of wars and economic recessions, but on average, that only happened once in a generation. As a result of the relatively steady environment, we got to a place where the lifecycle for an average business was 75 years. I could graduate from the University of Toronto, go to work for a company, retire from that company and never see one true reinvention in my lifetime. I would see incremental improvements along the way, but no true turnarounds.
Today, things are very different. We completed our Global Reinvention Survey in September of 2020, and it showed that the average lifecycle for a business is now six years. This indicates that we are now in a state of constant change, and as a result, the idea that we can treat transformative change as something that happens once in a generation is
