What did the advert say, “we won’t make a drama out of a crisis”

Over the course of the last week, many of you in your change and transformation functions will have been facing uncertainty. You will be assessing what actions you and your organisations need to take to address, and more importantly mitigate the immediate and ongoing impact of Coronavirus on your business.

Hot on the heels of the business challenges that Brexit presented to change functions in 2019, COVID-19 now has the potential to significantly impact in-flight and planned change agendas to levels not seen since the finance collapse in 2008.

Depending upon your industry, sector and service, the impact will be varied in size and scale, however to each of you individually it will feel somewhat overwhelming as the endpoint is unclear and there is no ‘playbook’ that you can turn to.

Take appropriate action

In operating businesses, we are used to working with a suite of processes designed to protect our business in times of need; the likes of incident management, business continuity planning, risk management and ultimately disaster recovery. However how often do you feel that the scenarios captured are not the ones that present themselves in real life?

The result being that when, as now, a crisis situation presents itself, there is not always a ready prepared script, set of steps, actions or answers to follow, which is unnerving. Not every organisation has a dedicated and skilled team who can mobilise on a dime to step-in and manage these types of extraordinary situations. More often than not the leadership team set the tone, alongside continuing to run the business at a time of heightened stress and pressure. We understand why people will wobble given the circumstances and may be tempted to make short term decisions on whether to continue with their change.

There are actions that change functions and organisations can take over the next few weeks and months to proactively mitigate the impact that this event may have on your business and put you in control.

Effective Communication

As with any crisis environment, it is important to remain calm and in control. The situation by its nature is often fluid, with regular and, at times, conflicting information requiring assessment, action or discarding. Therefore, think about your communication plan as this plays a crucial role in providing the level of confidence that your teams need to hear from you.

Be clear, concise and accurate in providing the facts upon which decisions can be taken by you or others, this is not the time for subjectivity as it clouds the agenda. Focus on the value of the information and providing the key messages, actions and decisions that you require of others.

In these challenging times the basics are your best friend. Keep a clear head and as obvious as it sounds focus on what needs to be done, in what order, to enable you to move forward towards your required outcome, ie prioritise as everything else is a distraction.

Prioritise

That sounds simple doesn’t it, but are you sitting there wondering what and how to prioritise, particularly your change agenda? There are many models, methodologies and approaches, however within the context of this scenario, we are talking about prioritising within a deteriorating situation, when time is not on your side - in saying that, there is a lot to be said about taking the right amount of thinking time to arrive at the right answer, rather than rushing to get the wrong answer that may hurt the business.

The reality of the situation is that we as human beings excel in times of need and you’ll be amazed how much you can achieve in a single day when you put your mind to it. It comes back to focusing on the outcome that you want at this specific point in time – which may differ from the previous day, week or month, just by the nature of the moving feast.

Things to remember

Keep it simple and effective, starting by setting out clear prioritisation criteria. Agree and communicate these criteria in advance as it will enable a more controlled assessment of the landscape.

The criteria should be measurable, so consider a number of different factors, with parameters and attributes as these provide further help to the prioritisation process.

Use easy to understand alignment, common examples include: alignment to strategy; regulatory and mandatory requirements; scale of the required investment; in-year financial benefit; dependencies to other undertakings; financial performance; level of complexity; and level of risk.

Then you are ready to facilitate the decision-making around the priorities. By agreeing the criteria by which you are going to prioritise up front, you make the conversation as much about applying the ‘initiatives’ to the criteria than the subjective or emotive underlying topic.

Ongoing Review

In a deteriorating environment, plans rarely stay static for long, therefore you may need to undertake an ongoing prioritisation, with consistent repeatability. Get in the habit of writing down the rationale as well as the decisions taken – the control mechanisms are crucial as you could be faced with emerging business, operation, technology or even market impacting challenges that present themselves, requiring assessment.

Acceleration

There are ways to make the boat go faster, however these are often reliant upon your level of confidence that they will provide an accurate output in line with your desired outcome. As an example, if you are comfortable with the capability of those involved to remain impartial and not defend their ‘pet initiative’, then consider whether you can use something like the MoSCoW analysis or prioritisation model, which enables you to reach a common understanding on the importance each initiative has, and quickly assign an outcome aligned with:

Must have: Non-negotiable or mandatory

Should have: Important but not vital, add significant value

Could have: Nice to have, small impact if left out

Would not have: Not a priority for this specific time frame

Help and Support

Many of you will recognise these challenges. Some will already be in the process of understanding what you can do differently under the circumstances, whilst others may be scratching their heads, trying to work out which way to turn. You know that you must take action, you know that your teams and stakeholders are looking to you to show leadership and direction, in a decisive way, but you are just not too sure how best to do this.

In times of uncertainty, remember there are others involved in your supply chain. Be sure to build loyalty through adversity, which includes understanding the upstream and downstream impact to your internal team, suppliers, vendors and partners, as you will need their loyalty when you rebuild in due course. Collaboration is the key, working together to undertake the scenario planning through to year-end.

If this sounds daunting and you feel that you need help that’s fine, you should ask, what is it they say, ‘two heads are better than one’ or ‘many hands make light work’.

However, now more than ever look for ways to use others with the right experience who can help you. We have extraordinary experience and we're used to working in difficult, stressful situations, with lots of ambiguity thrown in. Our skilled and experience team bring calm structured thinking, breaking down the challenges and providing you with pragmatic solutions. In practical terms we are used to working remotely, orchestrating virtual teams, and working in different, often global, locations and time-zones concurrently.

We have a simple and pragmatic approach that helps our customers through every step of their own bespoke journey, and we’d be delighted to help you through yours. Our leadership team all know how to focus on prioritisation activities and if you want to overlay this with some of their other strengths please don’t hesitate to pick up the phone and ask to speak to them, they are great sounding boards in times of need.

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