The future of work is one of the most crucial platforms currently for business leaders as organizations have to prepare themselves to adequately deal with megatrends and disruptors in their technical and physical environments. At the same time, megatrends and disruptors can present both business opportunities and threats. The research question this study dealt with was: How should high-performance organizations (HPOs) address megatrends and disruptors in such a way that they can secure sustainable performance?
Thirteen megatrends and one disruptor were matched with the characteristics of HPOs, making use of the HPO Framework, which
Keywords: future of work; megatrends; disruptors; high-performance organizations; future-readiness; opportunities and threats
Introduction
As was the case in previous decades, organizations in the current era have to deal with disruptions in their environments. These disruptions can take the shape of (1) megatrends, described as large social, economic, political, and technological changes that are slow to form, and once in place, have an influence for some time, between seven and ten years, or longer [1], or (2) disruptors, defined as “someone or something that prevents something, especially a system, process or event, from continuing as usual or as expected” [2]. The main difference between megatrends and disruptors is the speed with which they appear and the effects they have, i.e., megatrends are changes that (often gradually)
take place over a longer period, while disruptors are short-term, seemingly unexpected sharp changes with a high impact [3]. Both can present business opportunities, but more often than not, they are seen as threats to future business growth or even to the sustainability of the organization [4,5]. A high-performance organization (HPO), defined as “an organization that achieves financial and non-financial results that are exceedingly better than those of its peer group over a period of five years or more by focusing in a disciplined way on that what really matters to the organization”, is seen as an organization that potentially thrives because of these disruptions. This is because…
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