Facing Uncertainty: The Answer Lies in Having a Sense of Urgency

In recent months, requests for workshops, programs, and conferences on "how to navigate or innovate in times of uncertainty" have skyrocketed. Business leaders are seeking answers as their options for action are increasingly limited, whether due to the sociopolitical landscape or the realization that competitors are hot on their heels, winning customer preferences.

From the far reaches of corporate decision-making comes a cry for speed in transformation and presenting novelty to the customer. Despite all external challenges, the greatest challenge for many organizations is overcoming complacency and habit with the conviction that comes from being up against the wall.

Throughout my time facilitating business model transitions, I've noticed the gravitational pull of forms and customs within organizations. Legacy assets often swallow efforts or initiatives born out of mandate, sabotaged by disbelief in those embarking on significant change. Change reeks of rebellion, and purists fear the rebel who triumphs over the weight of old ways and their benefits. If change stinks, irrelevance is worse.

We must approach the topic with frankness and without assigning blame but by identifying detractors and allies to co-create the initiative from what has been learned and what we seek to avoid. Culture is formed from inherited traditions, which are shaped by people and their successes. No one wants to know about failures, but everyone eventually recognizes that lessons escaped from them. Establishing what we call a new growth agenda requires being realistic about the current situation, including those gray areas — plans or ideas that were not allowed to be explored, exploited, or matured.

At iLab, we build many projects in companies that resolve how to articulate what should and can be done once the culture is defined regarding which direction to take. We embrace the chaos born of uncertainty and explore gray areas with extreme and radical ideas, but with a sense of purpose and viability for implementation. It's OK to run, but not to run scared, because that only promotes stumbling; we must move forward with determination and caution.

We take advantage of that catastrophic ability to imagine the worst scenarios as a means to improve strategy and increase resilience through an approach known as a pre-mortem.

The pre-mortem is not new. The technique began in military planning and then moved to strategic planning, based on one question: "What could go wrong?" It's not just about imagining a situation to the limit to focus resources and operational attention but about rewriting the necessary steps to ensure that those "what ifs" do not occur negatively.

To conduct a pre-mortem as a workshop, I recommend convening a small group from operational activities — those who know which buttons to press if everything fails. A clear and specific objective for the session is required, starting with formulating the hypothetical scenario. While the simplest approach is to refer to a project's or product's failure, it is more strategic to reimagine the organization's future from its very demise.

And we shouldn't be dramatic, just pragmatic: "The scenario has reversed, and from being in a position of leadership, we have lagged to the point of almost being at the bottom;" "Everything we thought would give us market share was copied and improved before our eyes;" "In five years, we will look back on our transformation journey as a failure."

We don't need to be explicit about why that baseline statement determined the strategy's death; we need to explore what would not lead to this prophecy coming true. After framing what determines this uncertain future, we must dissect all the causes or reasons that could likely explain that failure. The causes of this uncertain future can fall into one of six potential classifications: 1) Efficiency and Costs; 2) Quality and Service; 3) Decision-Making and Structure; 4) Flexibility and Adaptation; 5) Knowledge and Innovation; 6) Monetization and Ecosystems.

Each of these categories may take a particular form during the analysis as we explore the possible causes of the organization's future failure.

1. Efficiency and Costs: Streamlining operations, eliminating bottlenecks, and optimizing resource utilization, translating into greater efficiency and cost savings. By eliminating redundant tasks or automating manual processes, organizations can focus on customer problems without excesses.

2. Decision-Making and Structure: Optimizing communication and integration among those controlling critical operational variables and reviewing all hierarchy levels. Organizations can free up resources, reduce administrative burdens, and provide more time and space for fostering creative thinking, problem-solving, and efforts that sustain profitable differentiation through simplicity.

3. Quality and Service: Promoting binding control measures between areas, reducing errors, and improving coherence in internal requests if this resolves a customer need. By reevaluating and redesigning processes, organizations can identify areas for improvement in external services, forcing them to rethink precepts and beliefs that lead to reduced waste or work repetition.

4. Flexibility and Adaptation: Accelerating the work pace, reducing delivery times, and shortening cycle times. By identifying and eliminating non-value-added steps or implementing ideas, concepts, and practices from other industries or competitors, organizations can enhance their responsiveness to customer demands.

5. Knowledge and Innovation: Allowing the adoption of "not invented here" ideas. Being more receptive to formulating hypotheses and creating experiments with resources to validate them. Reformulating whether current actions are the most aligned with customer needs or merely respond to self-imposed regulatory requirements. Designing processes that are adaptable and easily adjustable to capture experiences and integrate formulas from outside the organization's boundaries and ecosystem.

6. Leadership and Management: Revisiting the operating model also involves calibrating the management model. Sustaining a competitive difference requires integrating a culture of constant adaptation from permanent dissatisfaction.

Participants in these exercises list variables or proposals that best fit each category and create a relationship of causes, allowing the creation of maps where some have specific weight over others. From there, they seek to create a weighting that adds up to 100% to differentiate what is important from what is urgent and to gauge the probability that failing to address a cause/reason will contribute to the vision of failure. Discussions clarify how these variables may have an external component, corresponding to a need dictated by a standard, policy, or reaction to competitive market determinants. It corresponds to an internal cause if it results from practices, forms, and orientations the organization's culture has adopted to accommodate the current times and circumstances. To facilitate the process, we propose a series of questions:

• If a reason or cause is EXTERNAL, what can be done to mitigate the risk, reduce exposure, or increase resilience against it?

• If a reason/cause is INTERNAL, is it already evident? Is it already happening/being done/not being done within the organization?

• If the reason is already happening in the organization, why? What could be done to stop or mitigate it? And why wouldn't we do that?

• If it's not happening yet, what information should we be analyzing? How can we be more aware and receptive?

By this point, there is a better position to visualize the map of causes and reasons, how they present and interconnect, and to weigh proposals on mitigating latent risks and the actions or next steps toward greater exploration. After conducting such preventive review processes, some questions remain about leadership involvement in instilling a sense of urgency within the organization, which will, in turn, facilitate or inhibit the preventive actions defined against the risk of strategic death, translating into concrete actions, plans, and possibly new relationships with the environment and its actors to make that catastrophic vision of the future less probable and free the organization from living off its past glories and securities.