Structured Change for Unstructured Times: The ClimateReadyVT Approach to Building Small Business Resilience
Small businesses constitute nearly 61% of Vermont’s private sector employment, and the state’s economic prosperity is closely linked to the health of these enterprises. In the aftermath of 2023’s devastating floods and landslides across Vermont, however, over 800 of the state’s small businesses are now grappling with disaster recovery and building their resilience in the face of escalating climate change effects (as well as lingering pandemic impacts). Nationally, the stark reality is that over 25% of small businesses typically do not reopen following a major natural disaster, highlighting the broader economic vulnerability to climate impacts. With limited resources and razor-thin profit margins, the capacity of many small businesses to adapt to climate change’s impacts is often highly constrained.
To help proactively address this challenge, we have recently partnered with Vermont Businesses for Social Responsibility (VBSR) and small businesses statewide on the ClimateReadyVT program. This initiative, which focuses on developing adaptable plans that protect businesses against climate change, emphasizes integrating climate resilience into overall business continuity planning, which recent research suggests can significantly improve a small business’s odds of fully recovering after a major disaster.
The ClimateReadyVT program approach mirrors some key principles of structured change management, a systematic approach that enables businesses to evolve from their present condition to their improved future state or way of working, with a strong focus on engaging employees and stakeholders, fostering empathy, and promoting inclusivity. The true value of structured change management emerges in its capacity to reduce risks, deepen stakeholder involvement, and facilitate seamless transitions. This is especially crucial for small businesses facing the challenges of climate change, as it offers a manageable and adaptable strategy for building resilience in a constrained resource setting. We see an important opportunity for small businesses to take advantage of these principles to both increase their resilience to future climate events and create a more enduring ecosystem for their establishments and the communities they serve.
Our approach to facilitating the ClimateReadyVT program also borrows key design thinking principles: emphasizing empathy to enhance a deeper understanding of the people a change can affect, inspiring innovation by better problem definition, and solution identification founded on human-centered approaches. Integrating design thinking with structured change management helps businesses develop solutions that matter to the people - employees, customers, and community members - most directly affected, facilitating smoother and enduring buy-in and execution of necessary changes.
Small businesses need to tackle many multi-faceted challenges, often working with only minimal time and resources. When a natural disaster strikes, well-designed planning and investments in resilience-building opportunities can be the difference between business survival and demise. By integrating structured change management and human-centered methods into resilience planning, the ClimateReadyVT program is giving small businesses the knowledge and tools to strategically confront climate change challenges head-on and reduce uncertainty when a disaster occurs, thereby significantly boosting their chances of thriving.