Winner of the Director General’s Award for Excellence in the small enterprise category
Business agility is knowing when to change course
Nobody enjoys being wrong but, painful as it is, recognising and correcting a business misstep is less uncomfortable than pursuing it to the (probably bitter) end.
“It is key in business to know when something is not working and to be responsible and accountable enough to stop a process, even if it has cost time and resources. Sometimes, an organisation can be so dedicated to the thought of an outcome that it ignores the signals. Business agility is knowing when to change course,” says Jessica Knight, head of the strategy at Cura Risk Management.
No business is immune to confirmation bias – seeing what you want to see, essentially – and this is why external perspectives from trusted, credible and objective sources can be so valuable.
For Cura, the adjudicators of the tt100 Business Awards Programme meet those criteria.
“By participating in the tt100 awards, we can avoid confirmation bias and receive external feedback about the value of what we are doing,” says Jessica. “Being inside a company, it is easy to think that everything is great. The tt100 adjudicators can see what we can’t see, and they have no reason to side with us that what we are doing is worthwhile.”
It means a lot to the company, therefore, that the adjudicators selected it for the 2020 Director-General’s Award for Overall Excellence, which was one of five awards that Cura took home last year.
An important reason why the tt100 awards have such credibility is the application of the TIPS model. “Everything we do can be linked back to TIPS in some shape or form,” says Jessica, adding that an advantage TIPS offers over some other western-oriented business theories is its flexibility to local contexts, cultures, and conditions.
“Theory is very pretty but business is quite chaotic,” she says. “You have to be able to take a theory or model and tweak and adapt it to a more homegrown context. TIPS speaks to that.”