Imagine you are captioning a cricket team and have set amazing plans for the opposition. You got their best batters out for cheap. Your plans worked. There are the tailenders to deal with, but these folks don’t really know how to hold a bat. How certain are you that you can dismiss them quick?
You may be confident but can never be sure. How many times have we seen totally unexpected players rise up to the challenge and take the game away? This is when your strategy is tested to the limit.
Plans that rely on only one approach are bound to get upset.
Today we will dive into a core aspect of ensuring your strategy will work and be bullet proof. A strategy is usually formed when you want to attack a new problem, or when you want to enter a new marketplace. How will you know if your approach is robust or not?
The price for failure is high – let’s see how we can avoid paying it.
Why does that happen in the first place? The reason is that we haven’t factored everything at the planning stage. During execution, we realize our assumptions may not be correct. Or the market may throw us a new challenge – like a bowler showing amazing batting skills! We are caught up in a cycle of reacting instead of responding.
In other words, we are not operating from a position of strength. How can we change that?
Scenario Planning to the rescue. This calls for building a situational awareness session as a part of your planning process. We want to address all possible factors that may affect our product or service. Bake in both internal factors such as team ability or budget and external factors such as customer adoption or competing products.
This is best done via a What-If exercise with a team.
As a lead, ensure each team member is aware of the problem being solved. Ask them for their thoughts on how to solve it. What are the factors they can think which may help and hurt the charter? What are the other scenarios that could be considered?
Give people that time to think. Maybe a couple of days. After that, assemble as a group and ask people to submit their top suggestions and concerns. This is a great starting point to address the applicable ones.
How do you avoid over-thinking this process?
There are several ways. One approach is to limit the entries per team member to top 2 or 3. Another approach is to group all submissions and categorize them. Tackle the top categories. Even if you don’t address unlikely scenarios, it will be a conscious decision.
This exercise ensures your entire team knows all variables and hence, they are better adapted to the task.
This article is inspired by The Four Ways to Pressure Test Your Strategy by Rick Lynch and Jay Galeota.
In this video, I dive into a longer explanation:
Happy Ideating!
Hemang.