Drifting Isn’t a Strategy

The storm isn’t coming, it’s already here, and many leaders are realizing they’re sailing without instruments. The current business climate is a storm of volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity. Strategic plans are outdated overnight. Decision-making feels like a risk. And yet, standing still isn’t an option. Leaders are under pressure to keep moving, whilst everything keeps shape-shifting.

You are not alone. Research shows that:

• Two-thirds of executives struggle to make decisions fast enough during volatile times.
• Seventy percent of business transformations fail, often due to misalignment and unclear direction (and that number comes from simpler times).
• Half of leaders admit to delaying decisions when markets become unstable.

Here’s the dilemma: When chaos hits, everyone is working hard, but without coordinated direction. The energy is real and the effort is sincere, but there are only limited results to show for it.

Conventional business management practices are largely geared toward maintaining steady-state operations or planned projects, changes and growth. Planning cycles are driven by calendar years, historical performance data and negotiated delivery times. But today, you do not have the level of control over your world for these traditional tools to facilitate progress. To make it through this storm, leaders need more than motivation. They need navigation, as after this disturbance, there will be another, and another.

That’s where the chaos compass comes in as a framework to help leaders regain grip, restore clarity and move forward in alignment. Business, like sailing, has situations in which doing nothing is unthinkable, disastrous even. Taking the decision-making mechanics and people dynamics tools and practices from these worlds and translating them for use in a business context offers a course to success in a volatile world.

The Chaos Compass does precisely that, and here are its eight elements.

1. Get your bearings.

Start with situational awareness. Map out what you know and don’t know inside and outside your organization. Involve a wide variety of people to create trust, buy in and get those perspectives from those angles you do not see yourself. Where are the bottlenecks, disconnects, gaps and opportunities?

2. Identify your nearest safe haven.

If the storm worsens, where do you go? Determine whether you can stabilize while operating or if you need to carve out space to regroup. How long could you afford a holding pattern based on liquidity and current contracts if needed?  Can you pause noncritical activity and create the bandwidth to work on current priorities?

3. Reclarify the destination.

Is your original goal still valid? Has success been redefined? Do you need some near-term interim targets so your team has direction and urgency without false certainty? Redundancy in communication is going to help you iron out ambiguity, misalignment and identify where your definition or boundaries need sharpening. Clarity directs energy.

4. Diagnose the big levers.

Focus on the two to four areas to invest time and resources in to get you back on track toward success. Focus is the key to success in turmoil, so deprioritize distractions and noncritical tasks to free up capacity and “noise” in the system. Make sure the interdependencies between these efforts are identified and resourced.

5. Identify your nearest safe haven.

If the storm worsens, where do you go? Determine whether you can stabilize while operating or if you need to carve out space to regroup. How long could you afford a holding pattern based on liquidity and current contracts if needed?  Can you pause noncritical activity and create the bandwidth to work on current priorities?

6. Reclarify the destination.

Is your original goal still valid? Has success been redefined? Do you need some near-term interim targets so your team has direction and urgency without false certainty? Redundancy in communication is going to help you iron out ambiguity, misalignment and identify where your definition or boundaries need sharpening. Clarity directs energy.