Deal with the uncertainty fallout from COVID-19.
Plans have come to a screeching halt.
Some are hunkering down.
While others are in free fall.
With all this uncertainty there is one thing we know—this week is very different from last, and next week will be different too.
We’ve moved from a time when we had confidence in the problems and the solutions to address them, to uncertainty on both axes.
Actions to take right now.
Here are five immediate triage actions to bring order and clarity to the feeling of chaos and discomfort:
Recognize the change and that a response is necessary.
Revisit your playbook—your goals, strategies, and portfolio mix.
(If you don’t have one now would be a great time to make one).Assess your activities based on an urgent and strategic prioritization.
Apply reasoned decision criteria to your activities, across your opportunity horizons, and decide what you might need to stop, start, speed up, or slow down.
Revisit assumptions and knowledge for high priority initiatives—what was valid last week may not be valid today.
If this seems daunting, or you don’t have the tools at hand to do it yourself, we can help get your team aligned on what to do next—quickly.
We’ve taken our in-person sprints and reconstructed them as virtual, online sessions to help you maintain, or rebuild, your teams’ momentum at this critical time.
Virtual Playbook Sprint:
Calibrating Goals, Strategies, and Portfolios in Uncertainty.
Create a Playbook for Change to set the expectations of what you want to deliver and how you want to do it.
Challenge Framing Sprint:
Painstorming in Uncertainty.
Equip your teams to apply a simple question-driven approach to quickly discover real pains/ needs/ opportunities/ challenges that exist as a result of changes occurring beyond your control.
Leaders of Next Sprint:
Leadership and Decision Making in Uncertainty.
Equip your teams for decision making in this time of heightened uncertainty. In this sprint we introduce the skills, language, frameworks, tools, and system needed to plan and meet goals and enable your team to avoid making costly gut-instinct-, political-, emotional-, and inconsistent-decisions.
Discovery-Driven Development Sprint:
Managing the Risk of Uncertainty.
Learn a radically different discovery-driven development process to execute your new priorities and initiatives. Discovery-driven development manages the risk of uncertainty by uncovering and addressing the assumptions that are most crucial to the success or failure of your teams’ efforts.