4 steps to plan for business uncertainty

COVID-19 seemed to bend the space-time continuum, with years somehow simultaneously dragging and flying by. In the warp, creating a strategic plan for your business felt about as useful as brushing your hair in a tornado.

But here we stand on the brink of a new year. On the face of it the wind has died down a bit, but leaders looking ahead to 2023 are seeing plenty of storms rolling in:

Economic turmoil and recession looming large
A tidal flow of talent searching for jobs, meaning or both
A fraying workforce, worn out by crisis after crisis
The ongoing need to ‘figure out’ remote and hybrid working

And on it goes…

Despite all that, it seems strategic planning is back on the agenda. And the temptation is to buff up that dusty crystal ball and start making plans again. Here’s my top tip: do not give in to it. In fact, pick up the crystal ball now, and hurl it with all your might into a nearby abyss.

If we have learned anything from the last few years, it’s that we can’t actually predict the future.

So, before you start detailing a plan, consider setting an intention, creating a vision and choosing a context for growth. Whereas plans are fragile in the face of change, intention, vision and context bring direction and motivation that can be applied to a shifting landscape. They act as a guide through change, rather than trying to predict what that change will be. Whereas plans tend to breed resistance to change (gotta stick to it), intention, vision and context enable resilience.

4 steps to shaping growth in unpredictable times

Here are four steps to building out an approach for the year ahead, which you can work on with your leadership team.

Step 1: Reflection: Look back and learn

Before you think ahead, think back on the year gone by. Consider the highs, the lows and learnings (or as Lien calls them, the Woo-hoos, Boo-hoos and Ahas).

Do the thinking as individuals initially, then see what’s emerging as a group. Ask each person to draw or find an image that represents how the year has felt for them personally.

At our recent team retreat, each person created and shared a reflection cube that captured their thoughts and feelings about 2022. As we shared those out, we were able to celebrate and learn together, and distill what’s important to us about how we want 2023 to be.

Step 2: Intention: Know what’s driving you to grow

Intention is powerful, especially in the face of change. It’s the difference between being swept along with what comes and navigating those shifts with a sense of purpose.

Intention comes from taking a moment before you think about what you want to grow, to ask why you want to grow. It’s a good opportunity to think outside the usual ‘metrics’ of growth - like revenue, headcount, customer reach - and consider what will make any of those things meaningful to you.

Get back to the biggest intention of your business - your purpose - and ask what progress in line with that might be like next year. (And if you don’t have a purpose, call me now).

Our intention for growth next year at Within is anchored in really leveraging the foundation we’ve built over the last few years, and living our partner experience internally to the fullest.

Step 3: Vision: Define outcomes

With that intention in mind, cast yourself forward to the end of 2023. Build out a picture of what’s changed. Don’t worry about how the change happened, just describe the outcomes that feel most important for you.

It’s helpful to physically change your surroundings here, as a way to priming you into thinking about change. To help us shift perspectives in South Africa, we went to the top of Table Mountain to get a new view. In North America, we bathed ourselves in the visual genius of Perception’s Da Vinci exhibition. New ways of experiencing a guy who dreamed, drew and designed new ways of experiencing things. (Yes it got pretty meta, but doing this kind of thing really helps stretch the imagination!)

Remember, this isn’t about predicting the future. It’s about manifesting it - making your intention more tangible, so you have something to move towards. Practice speaking to these outcomes in the present tense - as if you’re actually at the end of 2023, looking around you and describing what you see. Get it all out - then spot the themes in what you hear, and try to distill 3 or 4 outcomes that anchor what you most want to see change.

Step 4: Context: Manage the energy

The last step is all about the energy of growth. It’s enormously important, and almost always overlooked in discussions about strategic plans.

Bear in mind there are likely plenty of folks in your organization for whom growth is a dirty word. It means work harder and do more, when they’re already feeling overworked and overwhelmed.

Managing the energy of growth is essential. Ask yourself, how do you want growth to feel, and what’s the energy you and your people need to bring to make it happen? Leaning into story and metaphor is really helpful here. Get people to describe a feeling, or find an image that represents what they want growth to feel like. Talking about that will give you a much richer context.

Our client The Narwhal, an independent newsroom in Canada, chose a context for 2022 that was “Joyfully riding the unicorn”. The year before, growth had felt like “being dragged behind a runaway horse”. The new context enabled them to check in on, and adjust, the ambition and pace of their growth, so they can enjoy being on that journey.

The North America team played with the feeling of taking a leap and a risk by jumping on a group zipline. Key learning: anticipation of fear is the worst, but leaping together makes all the difference.

The grappling hook of the future

Armed with your intention, vision and context, you can start thinking about what it means to move towards those things. Prioritizing actions, assigning responsibilities, managing budgets. And, when the unpredictability inevitably shows up, come back to this thinking and reorganize the actions around them.

We tend to think about outcomes of the year ahead as things that will arrive at the end of a journey through time. We’ll work towards them through the year, and if all goes well at the end of that road, we’ll have what we set out for. The problem with this analogy, is that so much can happen along that road to knock us off course, that we have no control over.

Instead, imagine you have a magic grappling hook (bear with me). As you go through the year, you’re going to lob the hook into your vision, and pull parts of it back into the present. Instead of you moving toward that picture in the future, you’re pulling elements of it into today. You hold that rope, you throw that hook, it’s your intention and action that will bring about the change you want.

Please have a go at following the four steps above. See what you’ll discover about why you want to grow and what it will need to feel like to make growth intentional, meaningful and resilient. And let us know if you need a hand.

Ready to throw away your crystal ball and get into it?

Use these 4 steps to plan for uncertainty in 2023