A strong shared sense of purpose can supercharge your organization’s ability to accomplish big things, while a weak one holds you back. When built on a framework of Continuous Listening, this shared sense of purpose helps align your organization’s vision with your industry, customer base, leadership and workforce.

When information from listening channels aligns with a shared sense of purpose, it reveals opportunities to try new things. Those practicing agility at scale will prototype constantly, creating a feedback loop within their Continuous Listening framework to make smart, proactive investments and speed response to market changes.

With the wild shifts in workplace culture that occur with adverse change events, workplace experience becomes vital. Strategic investments in that experience can reinforce a culture of flexibility, increasing innovation, improving employee engagement, reducing turnover, and ensuring that your organization successfully navigates macro events.

Connecting employees to your organization’s “why” not only helps keep everyone personally engaged, but also drives strong organizational alignment. And by combining strategy with radical transparency, leaders can engender a culture where employees are able to freely exchange ideas without creating lasting conflict.

Active leaders partner with their workforce in times of adversity, leading through change rather than directing the team from a safe distance. It’s this active support that forms the basis for sustaining your organization through adverse change events—and emerging better and smarter.

Distributing leadership and perspectives helps create a culture where power is shared and influence is encouraged. By also tapping into the knowledge and experience of a broader section of society, you can build a more diverse and inclusive workforce. And by embracing diversity in the C-suite, your organization will be better equipped to face adverse change events.

Every time an organization lives through a major change event, it develops communal knowledge and experience, forming a sort of muscle memory. A cycle of failed change reinforces fear of change and resistance, while a cycle of successful change reinforces innovation and a willingness to embrace change.

When a macro change event occurs, some companies choose to take a rapid response while others focus more on research and strategy. Both approaches can be successful, but leaders with strong executive intelligence can act as proactively as possible, making important decisions swiftly, even when key information is missing.

Most organizations have created a business continuity plan (BCP) for prevention and recovery from potential threats, but what happens when there’s a global threat? Moving forward, all companies must plan for such disasters in order to navigate the global change events of tomorrow.

Organizations practicing Continuous Listening are uniquely equipped to support real-time financial monitoring. This empowers financial teams to respond more proactively to business needs and capitalize on opportunities by deprioritizing revenue and redirecting funding as needed to rapidly respond to market changes.

When adverse change events occur, adopting financial risk becomes more critical in order to capitalize on opportunities that the event presents. Without the ability to adopt such risk, your organization will be more likely to regress into earlier stages of growth.

People with agility are constantly disrupting themselves, adopting a personal mantra of continuous improvement. These individuals are comfortable with uncertainty and are likely to embrace change rather than become fatigued by it. As a result, they’re extremely coachable and eager to learn through continuous communication and collaboration.

Empathy enables managers to respect each team member’s unique needs, assigning work that supports both performance and satisfaction. This becomes especially critical during a crisis, when burnout flares, and people struggle to separate work and home. Flexible work location and core working hours reinforce culture by respecting everyone’s need for work-life balance.

Companies that support alternatives to the traditional 9-to-5 work week—such as remote work, flexible hours, work shares and gig work—experience 7% more benefits than companies that don’t. This accelerating trend supports the democratization of careers and investment in employee potential, allowing organizations to grow teams internally.