The first step to a sane business strategy in turbulent times, is admitting you don’t have one. Yet.

“Hi, my name is Simon, and I am powerless over the world; my business plan has become unmanageable.”

Okay, we’re probably not about to hear a bunch of CEOs sitting around an expensive club saying something like that any time soon. But maybe we should.

Some years ago, I fell upon the book Alcoholics Anonymous open at the page where it enunciates the famous 12 steps to recovery from alcoholism.

Begun in the 1930’s as a conversation between two drunks in a small town in Ohio, Alcoholics Anonymous has become a multinational franchise without raising a penny of venture capital—financed solely by members who are often destitute when they arrive. It has a become a publisher in dozens of languages and an event organizer that attracts tens of thousands to its conventions.

More unusually still, it has shared its intellectual property at no cost with a plethora of imitators addressing gambling, eating disorders, debt, and drug addiction, restoring tens of millions of lives from chaos to stable productivity.

If AA were a business venture, it would certainly be lauded as an extraordinary success. Indeed, it has been studied as such by no less pinstriped an outfit as the Harvard Business Review, most recently in an article entitled “Managing Change, One Day at a Time” (https://hbr.org/2014/07/managing-change-one-day-at-a-time).

No, I’m certainly not suggesting that every senior executive, country manager, division head, or CEO is an alcoholic/addict (although more than a few may hear from their families about being junkies for work, success, or adrenaline).

But here’s the thing. There are very few proven mental technologies for dealing with circumstances or conditions that overwhelm all your previous thinking.

And isn’t that exactly where we are right now? A moment when up is down, and down is up. When what appeared to be long-settled arrangements—the European Union, NAFTA, global trade flows, democratic decision-making—are under attack? When capitalism itself faces its greatest challenges since early in the last century?

In Mexico, the country I know best, we see old institutions being challenged and new ones created, new forms of political dialogue and agenda-setting sweeping away old ones. We are promised a national ‘transformation’ on the scale of revolutions—and like them, with an unclear destination.

Companies are in a quandary as to how to respond to these changes in their operating environments for which nothing in their organizational culture, or the backgrounds of their top decision makers, has prepared them.

The world has spun very far indeed beyond their ability to ‘control’ with reasonable forecasts based on past history. Business plans and strategies designed for that old normal are being recognized as increasingly unmanageable in the new one—whatever it turns out to be.

The first step is of course only that. But it is the start of a process of open-minded inventory-taking that opens up new ways forward – even when the world is out of control.

Step Two of the classic program is a recognition that one’s best thinking, not having solved the situation so far, is not about to. New thinking –help from outside—is required.

The third step is to give the help a chance: to trust the process it suggests to tame the turbulence of one’s surroundings.

The subsequent steps in the process first require a “searching and fearless” willingness to inventory what is –and isn’t—working in practitioners’ lives (for our purposes, read, ‘business’), and then specific measures to abandon the latter.

Each of these has an analog for business strategy. I hope to reflect on those in more detail in future posts.

For now, the key thing is that 1st step, the one that my friends in various AA-based programs tell me is the only one you need to do completely.

Why? Because it is the step where a person –or an organization—admits that what they’ve been doing isn’t working any more, and become ready to look for help.

It’s easier said than done. Asking for help is against our nature as individuals. Looking outside our organizational identities and cultures can meet similar resistance.

So we pretend that we were wrong about needing help. That things are actually going well. My friends call this ‘denial’. And we certainly see a lot of it in our political and economic environment these days.

I would suggest that we are in a state of society-wide denial about numerous problems arising out of our economic lifestyles. Climate change, inequality, and the threat of cataclysmic war, nuclear or otherwise, come to mind.

It seems unbelievable that 50 years after scientists concluded that increasing CO2 levels in the atmosphere would raise global temperatures, that the increasing frequency of extreme weather events is not dominating every political campaign in any country that makes a claim to responsible government.

Around the globe, wealth inequality has reached degrees historically associated with revolutions and societal upheavals. War is making a comeback as an arguably desirable way to settle international tensions, with the United States urging allies to join it against Iran, and observers of the growing tensions between nuclear-armed India and Pakistan over Kashmir wishing publically “that a war will sort this once and for all’. 

Name a realm of activity relevant to business –from domestic regulation to international trading norms to reputational threats against key executives—and we see new, unfamiliar, unpredictable, and potentially existential dangers emerging and morphing at breakneck speed—quite out of our control.

When it is obvious that what we have been doing has not contained these new circumstances of turmoil and uncertainty, to keep on doing the same thing and expecting a different outcome is one of the more popular definitions of insanity.

We need a new way of strategizing for turbulence, a way to draw management sanity out of apparent chaos. As noted, there aren’t many of these on offer (triage is another).

Certainly, there are worse ways of beginning to deal with the chaos, than by admitting we need to.