In front of adversity, Thrive! Or how to manage your crisis resolution plans.

It's more important than ever to develop the ability to turn that threat into an opportunity. To use this situation as a trigger for innovation, engagement and progress, and not at all aiming at going back to normal, but thrive and go beyond and better.

The current situation with the rapid spreading and burst of Covid-19 has put us in a situation of uncomfortable and is definitely destabilizing the global economy in each and every tiny aspect of our lives, as very well described in the excellent article by Thierry Hulot.

What we face here is more than VUCA. It's a total challenge of perceptions and paradigms. VUCA, since many years now has in fact been the normal way of working and doing business. The normal response to VUCA has been the classical Agile approaches, dynamics, frameworks, mindsets and principles... you name it.

But now, being Agile will not be enough. It's not about agility, or what was perceived as agility, meaning the ability to re-evaluate a given solution in an on-going way along the development of that solution... No. Now, we have to re-evaluate the solution, and not only the solution, but the problem itself, as even that can vary in shape, parameters, scope, nature.

So, what does it mean? How to address this new situation?

Stop looking at the problem you want to solve.

Seems foolish, or even stupid, but follow me on that for a second... The problem evolves. What we thought being the problem yesterday, or even an hour ago is not the same thing that appears now. So if we focus on the problem, we are in pursuit of something impossible to catch, because it disappears the moment you have identified it.

Concrete example? Until now, we were thinking: how to keep delivering our services to our customers if we can't see them? How to maintain business continuity until the situation comes back to normal and face to face meetings are allowed again? How to maintain our business as usual.

The problem is that now, our business as usual we wanted to preserve with so much effort is simply not relevant anymore. If we pursue its preservation we waste our efforts into something that doesn't exist anymore, nor even have a rational anymore.

Instead, come back to the roots. Come back to the Value you want to create, and of course, the perception of that value from the point of view of your stakeholders.

In my particular case, one of the current challenge we face is in-person training. The question we were trying to answer was, how to continue delivering in-person training if we can't go where our clients are, if we can't meet them in person? Actually there is a simple impossibility in the question. So we were pursuing the wrong prey. Instead of that, we have to come back to the roots: What is the value we provide to our clients? What is the value they gain from the in-person experience which they don't find elsewhere or through another channel? Presence, contact, connection, interaction, knowledge sharing, competency development... all of that and more. This is what our challenge is. Delivering this, and not maintaining in-person training at any cost of by any mean. If we were focusing on the in-person aspect, we'd lose our time and effort and miss the right spot, because the evolution of the situation made that problem being worse and worse as hours were passing and one solution was systematically invalidated after the other.

So forget about your problem. It's actually not relevant. What is important is the inner Value creation. Focus on that. Also, a Value statement is a positive formulation. Psychologically, you're not countering a threat, you're exploring an opportunity, and that perspective changes everything in our brains.

Don't counter your threats (negative risks), exploit your opportunities.

It's in fact a simple principle of Opportunity Management. Not Risk Management. Risk has often a negative sounding.

Problem, and we have just had a very blatant demonstration of that, our human brains are wired to identify and counter threats. It's been a factor of our survival as a specie since our ancestors were hunting in the bushes. Their main concern then was avoiding to be eaten by something else while hunting for their prey or scavenging for food. Since then, we have developed a very insightful capacity to see the bad side of a situation. And most of the risk management principles - business, strategic, project management - have been elaborated to identify threats and develop the appropriate means to counter them. Plan for the best, be ready for the worst, right?

And I know something about that, I'm a certified Risk Management Professional and I've been one of the authors of the PMI Standard for Risk Management on Portfolios, Programs and Project published by PMI in 2019 on the top of having worked on risk management procedures and guidelines for various organizations.

But that approach doesn't work anymore. If you focus on the threat you're actually again missing the point. The aim of the game is not anymore preventing a bad thing to happen (eg. "Oh...what can I do to prevent the "risk" of having people cancelling their training session, their meeting, their travel, etc?"), the aim is to exploit as much as possible the reversed opportunity ("what can I do to attract even more people, make my services even more attractive in the given context, knowing that they will disengage most probably?").

An opportunity represents the potential of realization of the opposite event representing an identified threat.

I have recently discussed with a lot of my contacts, clients, partners, competitors even, friends... And they all have a kind of plan to cope with the Covid-19 situation. But none of them has a plan to thrive in regards of that situation. It's about time to make one. And if you make your plans, develop your strategies to thrive, you'll see that, by coincidence (but that doesn't exist), you will also eliminate your threats.

Also, a positive approach is an opener for innovation.

The number of solutions available to solve an issue are often quite limited. Limited by our knowledge, (pre)conceptions, stress and the problem itself. As the number of possibilities to exploit an opportunity are basically limitless.

Adopting an Opportunity Management approach to your crisis plans opens the range of possibilities, pushes you to think out of the box and enforces innovation.

Conclusion:

To face this crisis or any other, because it's certainly not the last one...

• Focus on Value.
• Forget about the problem. It's the wrong duck.
• Don't counter the threat. Exploit the revered opportunity. It's easier, more motivating and it opens to innovation.