What Will Kill Us Next?

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One of my favorite movies is The Martian. Don’t judge. It pulls back the curtain on how astronauts solve problems and shows us what’s at stake during times of peril. The movie is a masterclass on the decision-making process and demonstrates how the intersection of time and data impacts each step. When it comes to decision-making, there’s a simple equation for good leadership: make more right decisions than wrong ones. And great leaders can make tough calls under the gun with minimum data.

Since founding Hunt A Killer in 2016, we’ve run a What Will Kill Us Next exercise during every quarterly off-site. But at the onset of COVID-19, we’re now reviewing on a weekly basis. Typically, our What Will Kill Us Next is running out of cash. Fast growth startups require a lot of cash, and we never seem to have enough. Our banker once remarked, “You all sure do move a lot of money, but you never seem to have any.” Yeah, story of our lives.

The objective of our What Will Kill Us Next exercise is to uncover the one thing that could make it all come crumbling down—we’re talking a lights-out, good try, maybe next time, shut-it-down kind of scenario. Our process starts with collecting as many ideas as possible from the team. It can be likened to crisis management—there are six phases with the first being the most critical.

Here’s our What Will Kill Us Next model: 

Identify. This is where we spend a bulk of our time. Thinking. Thinking of all the things that could go wrong. We learned very quickly during the early days of COVID-19 in the U.S. that no scenario was too extreme. Your job as a leader is to overcompensate and give the organization enough room to navigate freely. Coming up short during the identification phase may force an undesired course of action later when alternatives no longer exist. Create a list identifying all the hazards.

Rank. Easier said than done. We’re looking for the most plausible scenario with the biggest impact to the business. By using tools like a Risk Assessment Matrix, you can find the breakouts, and usually get to a top 3. During a recent exercise with all the managers at Hunt A Killer, we had a difficult time choosing a #1. But you need a #1 because all the focus must be on solving the thing that will kill you next (read: there is no #2 if you don’t solve #1).

Solve. Once you’ve identified the biggest threat to the business, it’s time to solve. Solutions are typically singular with multiple actions. For example, we identified inventory depletion due to supply chain degradation as a threat—without inventory we can’t make money. The solution was obvious: don’t run out of inventory. But how? We started by understanding supplier capacities, current and future disruptions, and logistical risks. 

We took action and increased inventory buys with current suppliers—the more we could get up-front from trusted agents, the more we hedged against their potential future disruptions. Next, we found back-up suppliers for products. We had to take geographical locations into account in order to mitigate impacts to logistics and regional spread of the virus. 

What if the problem became cargo freight? It wouldn’t matter how many finished goods were sitting on the docks. What if a government shut down a particular city or providence? It would do us no good to have supplier back-ups in the same geographical regions. We decided to find domestic suppliers by fostering new business relationships and negotiating pricing and sampling in a matter of days—a process that would typically take months.

Find the general solution (i.e. don’t run out of inventory), and list the actions you need to take to mitigate the threat.

Assign. “When everybody owns something, nobody owns it, and nobody has a direct interest in maintaining or improving its condition.” -Milton Friedman

Assign an owner to the solution and approve a budget. The most common question here is: can we work more than one problem? Yes, but it can’t use competing resources that are resolving higher priorities. If we’re using the example from above, and we believe that supplier impacts are the biggest threat to the organization, that won’t necessarily consume marketing or technology resources.

Execute. Work as fast as possible to resolve—the deadline for crisis situations is always NOW.

Rinse & Repeat. Don’t let all that hard work go to waste. Start with the same list but reanalyze the environment and ensure there’s nothing missing before jumping right to step two.

It’s important to remember when and when not to use this process. Planning redundancy is a good business practice—too much is a waste of resources. Our normal cadence for What Will Kill Us Next is during our quarterly off-sites. But we were running these exercises weekly in the early days of COVID-19 until we felt most threats were resolved. It’s not perfect by any stretch, and we’ve made mistakes, but we took early action and avoided a lot of problems.

The goal is very simple in today’s environment: Stay Alive. Then thrive.