Scenario Planning for Sanity in the Middle of Chaos

The first six months of this year have sure been dif­fer­ent than almost any­one would have expected.

Many peo­ple are set­tling down and can see a path for­ward, although there’s incred­i­ble uncer­tain­ty in terms of what the next six months will look like:

• Is there going to be anoth­er round of this virus?
• What’s going to hap­pen to the economy?
• How are we going to inter­act with humans in the work­place or in public?
• How you plan effec­tive­ly when in the mid­dle of chaos?

The real­i­ty is that there’s always poten­tial for a degree of chaos around the cor­ner — it just feels very dif­fer­ent when you’re right in the mid­dle of it.

So how do we thrive in times of uncer­tain­ty, and how do we plan? We need to be bet­ter pre­pared and to plan bet­ter. Here’s one of my favourite quotes:

“Vic­to­ri­ous war­riors win first and then go to war, while defeat­ed war­riors go to war first and then seek to win” — Sun Tzu, The Art of War

Because there are many dif­fer­ent sce­nar­ios that can play out, hav­ing done your best plan­ning helps you antic­i­pate many of them — and the ones most rel­e­vant to you. But no mat­ter what, you need to remain agile and able to adapt quick­ly to dif­fer­ent circumstances.

The ABC’s of Planning

When peo­ple talk about Plan B, they usu­al­ly mean a back-up plan for when things don’t go well. But I believe you need to have a plan for when things go well so that you are ready to move on oppor­tu­ni­ties. You need Plan A, B and C, so as you reflect on your plan for the next quar­ter, and set goals that are the most impor­tant, think about all three versions:

• A — Accel­er­at­ed - When things go in your favour
• B — Base­line - Your best guess of what’s going to happen
• C — Cau­tious – When things don’t go as well.

There’ll be trig­gers — for exam­ple, need­ing to hire more peo­ple or decreas­ing staff, buy­ing or reduc­ing inven­to­ry, pay­ments to cred­i­tors or issues with your next acquisition.

And always know your direc­tion and aspi­ra­tions, the vision that dri­ves you: your pur­pose and BHAG (Big Hairy Auda­cious Goal, à la Jim Collins) that give you cal­i­bra­tion and point your mind in the right direction.

So, you have a strate­gic plan that fills the gaps in between, and right down to what you are going to do on a quar­ter­ly basis. You just need the abil­i­ty to scale your plans up or down based on what actu­al­ly hap­pens over the next six months in order to man­age your busi­ness­es properly.

It’s about oper­at­ing with more options built into your plans.

That said, stay­ing nim­ble with your plans is more impor­tant. Work­ing with many great entre­pre­neurs, I’ve noticed that many of them like to let the sys­tem run loose — mean­ing that they have a plan, but they always have a cou­ple of doors open, in dif­fer­ent direc­tions, so that they can make changes very quickly.

They and their teams are very com­mit­ted to the plans they have on annu­al, quar­ter­ly and some­times month­ly basis; but if there’s a will­ing­ness to change direc­tion or deci­sions, they are pre­pared and will­ing to make those calls.

One of the com­pa­nies that we work with has been very, very for­tu­nate so find some tremen­dous oppor­tu­ni­ties in the mid­dle of this COVID chaos. Because of how their busi­ness is boom­ing, they are able to hire more peo­ple, but they’ve tak­en a dif­fer­ent approach. Nor­mal­ly, when they hire peo­ple, they expect them to work for three, five or 10 years. Now, they’re hir­ing peo­ple with the expec­ta­tion that it could be three months — or three, five or 10 years. Mean­ing that they are gear­ing up to be much more flex­i­ble, based on what changes in the marketplace.

This is also why many peo­ple move to out­sourc­ing, tem­po­rary employ­ees or oth­er flex­i­ble mod­els, which allow them to adapt quickly.

Anoth­er client need­ed to lay off peo­ple and now, as their busi­ness is com­ing back and get­ting bet­ter, their short-term plan is to not hire peo­ple back, yet; but to find addi­tion­al pro­duc­tiv­i­ty and effi­cien­cy. They are offer­ing more work to their exist­ing team – either pay­ing them over­time or giv­ing them addi­tion­al time off in their slow sea­son. And their team is much more cre­ative, nat­u­ral­ly putting more ener­gy into things that mat­ter most, let­ting projects slip in the nice-to-do cat­e­go­ry or busy work. If the mar­ket changes or their busi­ness slips, they don’t have to lay off, again, because they know it’s hard on their culture.

The Chal­lenge

• Set aside an hour or two to do your Quar­ter­ly Review and Plan, take a look at your Mas­ter Plan.
• Remind your­self what’s most impor­tant and then go reset your goals for the quar­ter, apply­ing the ABCs as needed.