(Expansion) – Most businesses are operating with the same design that has allowed them to stay alive during this crisis and economic uncertainty. A design in which the objective, rather than doing things differently, has been to make the organization as lean as possible to survive the context.
If they are lucky and thanks to their indicators, companies understand the short term, but the medium term and how to evolve over the next three or five years remains unknown.
But as long as organizations do not decide to carry out actions aimed at generating drastic changes that may even involve redefining the very purpose of the business, their capacity for growth and to create solutions that are adjusted to the moment in which we live will be limited.
While most companies lack the position, assets, or risk appetite to make the changes tangible, there is not going to be another right time.
The current market conditions and the new needs that customers have today are the best provocation to face uncertainty with a new action plan that can boost the long-term survival of companies.
Therefore, it is necessary that they dare to leave behind the traditional processes of strategic planning. They are operating in a complex and complicated scenario at the same time, in which the political and economic situation is only putting pressure on the entire system in which companies operate.
And under this scenario, there is a great risk that companies can plan with great biases, such as assuming that the current model is still valid and therefore open to predictions about the future or looking for elements that reinforce what is familiar and controllable to avoid confrontation with what is awkward and strange, such as the present moment.
History is full of examples of great brands and companies that ignored the need to reinvent themselves and dare to do things differently like Blockbuster, Sears, Nokia or Kodak.
Faced with uncertainty, the first instinct is to avoid all risks, paralyze development plans and anticipate short-term contingencies.
But the proposal goes in the opposite direction. It is about operating at the same time a process that opens the company’s resources to all the possibilities and combinations imaginable and to be imagined, in which the variables that cause the greatest uncertainty are applied as if they were a lever of change to develop solutions from there, not only in the short term, but also in view of the need to develop alternative opportunities to the current business.
There are many opportunities available for organizations that are willing to get out of the ordinary and bet on a new way of solving the problems that afflict them. One in which the raison d’être of the organization is even questioned. Only in this way will it be possible to build an organization resistant to uncertainty.
What follows, then, is to determine the level of uncertainty to adapt the strategy and this can be achieved with an analysis that considers the following variables:
1. A forecast of the future sufficiently precise for the elaboration of strategies.
2. A series of alternatives or scenarios likely to happen.
3. At least three potential futures in which the key variables for the construction of new business opportunities with high viability are delimited.
4. Identification of the elements that generate greater uncertainty.
All this will allow you to draw up strategies to face the problems that afflict your market today in new ways and will open the possibility of proposing innovative solutions that anticipate anything that could happen, unexpected or not.
Editor’s Note: Víctor Moctezuma is Founder and CEO of iLab. Follow him on. The opinions published in this column belong exclusively to the author.
