Episode #413: Strategic Planning In These VUCA Times

“October this year is when we can expect the turn around to kick off here in Japan”. Being the sunny optimist from Australia, that land of vast horizons and sweeping plains, that sounded doable a few months ago. Now we have a fourth wave, hospitable beds in Osaka are full and no room for new cases, as the numbers surge. This is the fourth lockdown and this current iteration has been almost continuous this year since the start of January. The vaccine roll out is slow and projections are grim. The best case scenario is that we have three more lockdowns between now and March 2022. The worst case scenario is that we have four lockdowns during that period.

So how do you plan anything in such a Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous world? The basics don’t change however, so let’s revisit them. We need to be clear about our purpose, our WHY. We do this through our Vision, Mission and Values. This stuff is not outdated. It is the glue we need to meld the team together and help each other get through this pandemic. We may need to take a hard look at the content, because Covid-19 may be forcing a re-think and a re-write. Having these statement hanging on a wall in an empty office, because everyone is working from home, makes them inert. We need to inject them into our daily work. In our case, we go through them with everyone, every day at 9.00am to start the day off together with a common understanding of what we are doing and why we are doing it.

We need to re-adjust and refine our goals continuously, because the situation keeps changing. These are likely to be refinements, than major changes by now, given we are nearly 18 months into this pandemic. Any need for major interventions should have taken place already. If that hasn’t happened as yet, then today is a good time to start.

Once we have adjusted our goals to reflect reality, we need a strategy to make them happen. This is needed to help us better define what things we should be working on. There are many things we could be working on, but which ones will have the most impact? Once we have made our choices between multiple possibilities, we need to start specifying what the activities of the team should be and how we are going to measure them.

We also need to have a system for easy monitoring of the key result activities being undertaken and their outcomes. We don’t want to bury ourselves in bureaucracy though, so the right level of touch is needed, to keep track of things directionally, rather than micromanaging everything and just annoying our people.

The tasks need some performance standards attached to them, so that our team members know if they are doing what is needed or not. This is often left out by bosses, as they just concentrate on the outcomes and don’t look at the processes for achieving outcomes. How will the staff know if they are doing what is needed and especially in a situation where they are working in isolation from everyone. Bosses need to be laser beam focused on communication at this point. It takes a lot of effort to contact individuals, but this is what is needed in a VUCA work situation.

Are the team members clear about what they have to do and why it is important? Are they clear on how their performance is being measured and are those measures considered realistic by the team members? Any perception that a goal is too much, leads directly to people just ignoring it.

We may be asking our people to cover off work they don’t normally do or engage in projects they have never done before, as we pivot as an organisation. Have we been clear about how much freedom they have to decide how to do the job? Have we mentally calibrated how much we will tolerate deviations from the expected performance? Often, performance of new tasks sees an initial decline, because the skills haven’t been built yet. If this decline continues, are we aware that is the case and are we ready for it? Have we made clear to ourselves how much reasonable margin of error we will tolerate? Are the team members aware of it?

Expecting perfect work in a time of trouble is focusing on the wrong thing. We want strong engagement with the why, solid commitment to the work to make sure we survive and the encouragement of as much creativity and flexibility as possible, in order to tap into opportunities which may present themselves. None of this is easy, but we need to go back to the basics and work on our planning of our strategy. Putting it off until things improve is missing the point. The strategy is there to make sure things do improve.