Business reinvention behaves like innovation. It runs as an uninterrupted path of discovery and an endless creative process built into the culture, rather than arriving as an event with a start date and a launch party. The question worth asking is whether you are actually capable of reinventing yourself.
The awards count for nothing here. So does past success, and so does last year’s result. You risk losing all of it from the moment you decide your success is secured, and we live in a volatile world. As the film industry puts it, you are only as good as your last film.
One day a company will put you out of business. It will probably be younger than yours and its leaders less experienced than yours. The worst part is that it will not take you by surprise, because you will have watched it coming from a long way off.
You may even have met its founders, back when the company was only an idea and they wanted to share it with you. You judged the idea weak, short on commercial prospects, or simply not credible.
| The inherited reflex | What it produces | The shift that transforms |
|---|---|---|
| Waiting for the eventMost organisations treat business reinvention as a response to a shock, launched once results or reputation have already been damaged. The trigger arrives from outside and the timetable is set by somebody else. | Reorganisation wearing a better nameA late response produces cost cutting, redundancies and a short-term reaction aimed at staying afloat. Fear settles among those who remain, and fear removes whatever creative capacity was left. | The disruptor was never a surpriseThe company that displaces an incumbent is usually visible years in advance, and its idea was often dismissed in a meeting. Reinvention starts by looking for the reasons behind a competitor’s success inside your own blind spots. |
Making the jump to reinvention
Starting a reinvention project is the hardest and the most important part of the whole exercise. The difficulty sits in the beginning rather than in the execution, because the start of a reinvention is really the conclusion of a long march towards awareness.
Why starting is the hard part
Before anything begins, somebody has to accept that the organisation needs to question itself, and then argue the case for breaking a period of waiting and standing still that has sometimes run for years. Why change while everything is going well remains the most reasonable objection in the room, and it is the one that kills most attempts.
Do not expect a gentle tune once the decision is made either. Success comes from unbroken determination and constantly renewed persistence, and reinvention will not be a comfortable walk, because every one of your certainties gets roughly handled.
Reinvention goes further than transformation or change. Adapting to the world with a coat of polish is putting on a tie to go to the opera. Reinvention is looking in the mirror and asking whether you can go to the opera, and whether you want to.
It starts with questioning your own values
Reinvention opens with a challenge to the fundamentals. Are our values and our business practices still suited to the world as it is now? That question sounds abstract until a group of people from across the organisation is asked to answer it honestly.
I watched a global energy business do exactly this. A cross-disciplinary working group was set up to test whether its four stated attitudes still fitted the society around it, covering solidarity, boldness, listening and working across boundaries.
The group did its job. The participants challenged the four attitudes properly, and the project was buried shortly afterwards. Asking a real question and then declining the answer is its own kind of decision, and it is worth naming as one.
Reboot, remake and reimagining are three different things
A short detour into film vocabulary, because the industry has already done the work of separating three ideas that business tends to blur. Each one describes a different relationship with the original, and only the third one matches what reinvention actually means.
- A remake tells the same story, modernised, with a new cast.
- A reimagining takes the setting or the plot of the original and explores new territory with it, in the way Planet of the Apes has been handled.
- A reboot proceeds as though the original never existed, which is what Spider-Man, James Bond and Superman have each been through.
Most corporate reinvention programmes are remakes. Same story, modernised, new cast in the leadership team.
Reorganisation is not reinvention
Reinvention gets confused with a word that dominated the 1990s and 2000s, which is reorganisation. The two differ in what triggers them, in what they do and in what they leave behind, and mistaking one for the other is expensive.
The two compared
The clearest difference sits in the trigger. A reorganisation needs an event to justify it, while a reinvention needs only the intention to stay relevant to the world. Everything else follows from that first distinction.
| Reorganisation | Reinvention | |
| Trigger | Follows a significant event that has affected results or reputation | No particular reason beyond the will to stay relevant to the world |
| Characteristics | A practice for climbing back up, using redundancies and a hunt for costs | Increased investment in innovation, creativity methods deployed, an innovation culture built, and thinking about the future that everyone takes part in |
| Results | Falling morale and falling confidence in the organisation | Tightens the bonds and gives people responsibility for the part they play in their organisation’s future |
Why a reorganisation cannot become a reinvention
Two mechanisms stop a reorganisation from ever turning into a reinvention. Both are structural rather than a matter of intent, which is why good people run bad reorganisations every year.
The first is timing. Reorganisations are precipitated by an event and trigger a short-term reaction, frequently followed by the departure of the people closest to the customer and to the product. The aim becomes keeping the business afloat, which means thinking about surviving tomorrow instead of growing the day after.
The second is what it leaves in the room. Fear settles among the survivors of a redundancy round, and fear destroys any remaining appetite for creative work. You cannot ask for bold thinking from people who have just watched their colleagues leave.
By the time a reorganisation is necessary it is usually too late. Reorganising means doing things differently with fewer resources, which is a long way from questioning yourself. The distinction is worth working through properly in my piece on transformation versus reinvention.
Looking the end in the face
Seeing ahead and seeing far requires accepting that an organisation, like a person, will die one day. Australian business statistics make that abstract idea concrete, and the numbers are larger than most leadership teams assume.
What Australian business mortality actually looks like
Australian businesses leave the market at a rate that makes reinvention a live question rather than a philosophical one. The churn happens every year, quietly, and it rarely makes the news unless a large name is involved.
The Australian Bureau of Statistics counted 2,729,648 actively trading businesses at 30 June 2025, with 370,500 exits during 2024-25 against 437,150 entries. That is a 13.9 per cent exit rate, meaning roughly one business in seven left the market inside a single year.
Add the entries to the exits and more than 800,000 businesses moved in or out of the Australian economy in twelve months. The stock looks stable from the outside because the two flows roughly cancel. Underneath, the turnover is enormous.
Everything is in decline at all times
Reinventing regularly is what stops an organisation sliding into the insidious spiral of permanent decline. Everything declines all the time: willpower, motivation, the appetite for change, the capacity to take risks, and creative ability along with them.
We very rarely notice, because we belong to the system that refuses to look at itself. So far, so good, says the man falling past the tenth floor.
Before crying disruption and denouncing some start-up for using an unfair advantage, start by looking inside your own organisation for the reasons behind their success. Blaming Uber is easy when you never took customer dissatisfaction seriously, and easier still if you never once considered that geolocation might be a remarkable efficiency tool.
I have watched this pattern in several countries. In Australia with the superannuation reforms, in France with the thirty-five hour week, and in the United Kingdom with trade union reform. Leaders are almost always reacting to an event they knew was coming for years.
The four questions to ask before anything else
An organisation (Airbnb) that wants to reinvent itself starts with one question written where everybody can see it: what could kill us? Four sub-questions turn that into something a leadership team can actually work with, and none of them is comfortable.
- What inside our own organisation could damage our competitiveness, in terms of process, human relationships, employee engagement or customer relationships?
- What small detail have we stopped worrying about that could lead to a difficult awakening?
- What reasons do customers give when they leave us that were never given before?
- Which business models could threaten ours?
Looking at what could go wrong is less pleasant than asking what could be done to grow. Worrying about no longer being relevant is where this has to start, and the third question is the one most organisations already have the data to answer and have never read.
Field note
The pitch they turned down, four years earlier
A leadership team asked me to run a session on disruption after a smaller competitor took a visible share of their market. The brief was to explain how the newcomer had moved so fast. The room wanted a story about technology and about a rival playing by different rules.
I asked instead whether anybody in the room had met the founders. Two people had. One of them had taken the meeting four years earlier, when the idea was a slide deck and the founders were looking for a partner rather than a competitor. He remembered declining politely, on the grounds that the numbers did not work and the model would never scale. Nobody in the room had known that meeting happened, because there had been no reason to record a conversation about an idea that went nowhere.
Before analysing a competitor’s advantage, find out who in your own organisation met them first and what they concluded. The judgement that dismissed the idea is usually still operating, and it will dismiss the next one on exactly the same grounds.
Seeing far enough ahead to imagine your reinvention
Proactivity is slowly entering organisations that have decided to stop being surprised. Two practices do most of the work: scenario planning, which imagines several plausible futures, and trend groups, which watch the present closely enough to notice what is changing in it.
Scenario planning, forty years of practice
The best known example is Shell, which has published prospective scenarios for around forty years and involves several thousand of its own people in building them. The value sits in the discipline of writing several futures down rather than in predicting the right one.
Scenario planning suits organisations with long asset cycles and long lead times, where a decision made this year commits capital for a decade. It suits fast-moving businesses considerably less, since the scenario horizon outruns the planning horizon.
Trend groups and trendstorming
A trend group gathers people from across the organisation to work on subjects the executive team has not asked about yet. ORES, a Belgian gas and electricity distributor I worked with, brought together staff working on topics ranging from public-private partnerships through to recruitment on social media.
That organisation was also an early user of trendstorming, a method for turning observed trends into usable options rather than into a slide about the future. The output is a set of choices a leadership team can act on this quarter.
Choosing a foresight approach against your own criteria
Four approaches let an organisation see further ahead, and they differ in cost, in horizon and in who takes part. Choosing badly produces a document nobody reads, which is the most common outcome of foresight work in Australian organisations.
Four approaches compared
The deciding criterion is who participates. An approach run by a small central team produces analysis, and an approach that involves people close to customers and products produces change. Both are legitimate, and only one of them starts a reinvention.
| Approach | Horizon | Who takes part | Suits you when |
|---|---|---|---|
| Scenario planning | Five to twenty years | A large cross-section, if you run it properly | Your decisions commit capital for a decade or more |
| Trend group | One to three years | Volunteers from across functions, meeting regularly | You want early signals and you can protect the time |
| Trendstorming workshop | Six months to two years | A mixed group, over one or two sessions | You have trends already collected and no decisions coming out of them |
| External market study | Whatever the brief specifies | A supplier, plus whoever briefs them | You need evidence for a decision already framed |
The signals that point to each one
Diagnose from what happened to your last piece of foresight work rather than from what you would like to know. The fate of the previous report tells you more about which approach fits than any assessment of your strategic needs.
- Your last market study changed no decision, which points to involving the people who would have to act on it.
- Your team can name three competitors nobody had heard of two years ago, which points to a standing trend group.
- Your capital decisions run past the next decade, which points to scenario work with real participation.
- You have folders of trend material and no options, which points to a trendstorming session rather than more collection.
Work out which word you actually need
Reinvention, transformation and reorganisation get used interchangeably and cost very different amounts. Read my breakdown of what separates transformation from reinvention before you name your next programme.
How I can help you take the first step
I work with leadership teams at the point where the decision to reinvent has not yet been made, which is the hardest and least glamorous part of the job. The work runs from a keynote that makes the case, through to standing trend groups that stop the organisation being surprised again.
Keynotes and executive sessions
A keynote suits a leadership group that knows something has to change and has not yet accepted what that means for their own decisions. The four questions get asked in the room, with their own answers on the wall by the end.
Executive sessions go further and take longer. They work through the meetings your organisation has already had with the people who will compete with you, which is usually an uncomfortable hour.
Trend groups and trendstorming workshops
I set up trend groups and train the people who will run them once I leave, because a trend group that depends on an external facilitator dies within two cycles. The design work covers who joins, how often they meet and where their output lands.
Trendstorming workshops suit organisations sitting on collected trend material with no decisions coming out of it. The session converts observation into options, and it ends with somebody owning each one.
Conclusion: business reinvention starts with a question you would rather not ask
The company that displaces you is already visible. Somebody in your organisation has probably met its founders, listened to the idea and concluded that the numbers did not work. That conversation was not recorded, because there seemed no reason to record it.
Write what could kill us where your leadership team has to read it, then answer the four questions honestly. Look for the reasons behind a competitor’s success inside your own decisions rather than in their unfair advantage.
You are only as good as your last film, and business reinvention is the practice of never believing otherwise.
Frequently asked questions about business reinvention
What is the difference between business reinvention and transformation?
Transformation adapts what already exists to new conditions, keeping the underlying model intact. Business reinvention questions whether the model itself should continue. Transformation puts on a tie for the opera, reinvention asks whether you want to go.
When should a company start reinventing itself?
While results are still good, since a reinvention launched after a shock becomes a reorganisation. Waiting for a trigger means acting with fewer resources, less time and a workforce already worried about redundancies, which removes the creative capacity the work depends on.
Why do reorganisations fail to deliver reinvention?
They are precipitated by an event, aim at survival rather than growth, and often remove the people closest to customers and products. Fear then settles among those who remain. Doing things differently with fewer resources is a long way from questioning your own model.
What is a trend group and who should be in it?
A trend group is a standing cross-functional group working on subjects the executive team has not asked about yet. It works best with volunteers close to customers and products, protected time, and a defined place where their output lands so it changes decisions.
