Snuggle Down With Uncertainty

We are living in unprecedented times, COVID-19 has shuffled the board, players, and the rules leaving us with little insight into what the future holds.

Here are 5 ideas that could help us de-risking our business future:

Create a plan with decision milestones rather than committing to details up-front

Deferring decision making to the most optimal time (Cost of Delay vs Availability of Information) will help increase your effectiveness. This is NOT Analysis Paralysis, you should constantly be making prioritized choices (Read more: Set-based decision making)

Treat past strategies and knowledge with a healthy level of skepticism

Use data and market feedback above expert opinions (Read more: First Principle Thinking)

Value getting to the right answer above being the one to give it

Increase diversity during decision making and demand debate (Read more: Cognitive Diversity, Demand Debate, Ontological humility)

Increase the cycle speed of information

Double up on the rate that information cycle through your organization (up, down, horizontal and external communication). Focus on responsiveness over predictiveness, the higher the frequency of your feedback loops the faster you can respond to opportunities or threats as they appear.

Invest in growing new future possibilities using a progressive exploration process

Building a lean exploration strategy can provide the platform to launch progressively maturing products that can organically grow to their full potential -or- fall away. This approach enables strategic agility at reduced risk as your investment increase as the certainty does (Read more: Lean startup, Problem Market Fit, Prototyping, MVP, Product Market Fit, etc.) below is an example where some supporting concepts were combined into a single model:

Let me know in the comments what are the key thought helping you navigate and making decisions during this time!