Managing Your Business

in Times of

Great Uncertainty

Managing a business – not just to survive but to thrive as well – has never been more challenging.

This website is dedicated to helping executives, managers, and entrepreneurs achieve success despite the enormous challenges.

Managing Uncertainty Blog

This sharply-focused blog is aimed at building a solid base of practical information on managing a business during fast-changing conditions and great uncertainty.

We are all working in a very different world that will never return to “normal” but will evolve into something new for which most past practices will be ill-suited.

Effective new management practices will be those developed by trial, assessment, and adaptation. Learning by doing. Innovation will be critical.

The blog will try to touch on every important practice that readers might find of value.

★ Managing in the world as it is

★ Organizational agility

Managing in the world as it is

We just have to wait until the world returns to normal. All we need to do is a few steps that accommodate the current disruption, which will go away soon.

Do you believe that “normal” will return reasonably soon?

Evidence, growing every day, says no. One of our tools is designed to track this evidence. What it says right now is that we are experiencing fundamental changes and that “normal”, aka the past, will never return. We must deal with the world as it evolves, not as we wish it might be. How can we do this?

So much has been written about why the world is misbehaving but none of this provides effective guidance about direction or practices.

Worse yet, there are so many different opinions on what is going on, with agendas and viewpoints from every angle, that it is mostly impossible to decide which one is reality.

To manage a business effectively in such a world, we have to figure out how to work within a constantly changing context – one that we may not really understand. This operating context is the world as it is (for the moment at least).

Management practices generally assume a reasonable degree of stability and predictability. They apply to a world that no longer exists.

Can these practices work in the world as it is today?

Almost certainly not.

If this is truly the situation for managing today, what to do?

The default appears to be along the lines of “deal with each day as it unfolds”, a kind of roll-with-the-punches approach. You will immediately see that this is an almost certain recipe for disaster at some point.

Organizational agility

Outlines of a new set of effective management practices are already beginning to appear. One of the most important is agility.

Agility, usually defined in the context of sports, refers both to the ability to move quickly and easily and to the ability to think and understand quickly. It is an essential skill in situations that are changing rapidly and often unpredictably, which sounds like our business world today, yes?

Business agility, however, is not a personal skill but an organizational skill. The business – and specifically its management – must be able to think and understand quickly and then to move quickly and effectively.

This critical skill is not present to any real degree, especially in most larger businesses. Yet it is vital for survival in the near-term and ultimately for success in the longer-term.

Tools & Examples

Managing in uncertain, unpredictable times requires a much different set of tools and approaches. What worked in past will not work in what we face now.

These tools and approaches unfortunately have not yet been developed and tested. It is far from clear what we need and what may work effectively.

To help you get a start on tools that might be of value to you, this section offers some simple tools as well as several examples of how they might be used.

These are offered free to readers in the hope that improvements may be shared as well.

★ Situation tracking

★ Scenario development

Situation tracking

Situation assessment involves figuring out what is happening out there in our business world so that we can develop ways to avoid major problems and to take advantage of good opportunities. Tracking is simply updating the assessment routinely.

All too often, this essential management process addresses both much too broad a viewpoint and largely wishful sets of responses. The result can be interesting but impractical.

Today, we are in a fast-changing, unpredictable, and uncertain business environment. No time for detailed studies and considerations as in past. What we need are simple approaches that capture situation essentials and permit fast, evolving actions.

The situation assessment approach we favor focuses only on how whatever-is-happening-out-there as it directly affects our business. We are looking at impacts – ones that we can measure reliably and frequently.

For a retailer, this might be a combination of store cash flows, store sales, and store traffic. Many more metrics could be added but just these three can tell us a great deal about how the situation is affecting our business.

Additional situation details may be needed as we try to develop and adapt effective actions in an agile sense. One or more of these may be added subsequently to our situation assessment set.

For our retailer, this might involve tracking groups of strong stores against groups of weak stores where performance differences may be operationally significant.

Our Tools & Examples section contains four simplified business examples in enough detail to show you how this might work in practice: retailer, distributor, trucker, and manufacturer.

These examples are intended to guide those users who might want to develop their own situation assessment. You can do this independently of website tools or by using the website tools here.

Scenario development

The most powerful method that I have run across after trying out almost everything is an approach that builds on sets of scenarios. Scenarios, as most of you know, are simply situation possibilities – each described in our approach by a particular situation assessment projection.

Scenarios are usually given descriptive titles for easy understanding. The simplest ones are: best case, good, not good, and worst case (or truly awful).

We suggest developing a situation assessment, or projection since these have not yet happened, for each scenario using you simple set of situation metrics.

The Tools & Examples section has examples of scenarios that might be suitable for each of our four businesses. You can also develop a scenario set and tracking the actual situation for your business using our simplified tools or you can use the examples to guide developing your own scenario set independently.

Is this approach recommended, or just one option among many? It is I think a recommendation based on my background and experience in doing this kind of thing over many years. Or, more likely, it will serve as a starting point for those who can develop their own approaches for their specific situations.

Business Coaching

For site users who may be interested in specific help with their situation and challenges, business coaching services are available at a modest cost.

These services are fully online, as so much else today, but with the important goal of providing valuable coaching process narratives.

As explained in detail in my short book Executive Coaching Insights (Amazon Kindle), process narratives can greatly enhance the coaching effectiveness.

You will be able to take advantage of my extensive and varied experience.

★ Fully online coaching

★ Process narratives

Fully online coaching

Although the situation today has forced many business activities to become partially or fully online, our coaching services have been designed fully online from the start. As the book explains, this trend has been underway for many years.

Being fully online offers at least three important advantages:

Much lower costs: Onsite coaching is generally expensive due to travel time and expenses. Online eliminates this major coaching cost component.

Eliminates scheduling hassles: We use messaging interactions (e.g., like email) to make them asynchronous. Phone and video coaching is synchronous (both parties available at the designated time), which often requires a good deal of rescheduling.

Process documentation: Messaging done by process participants generates a document stream that we refer to as “narratives” (see below). No more meeting notes and notes management chores.

Process narratives

Over many years of coaching executives, entrepreneurs, and managers, I have learned the vital importance of process documentation. Meeting notes prepared from memory or handwritten notes during sessions tend to be both incomplete and error-prone. These require much subsequent back-and-forth to remedy to the satisfaction of participants.

Messaging-based: Using messages for both coaching process interactions and process narratives is another cost-saving and effectiveness element. We use the popular Slack messaging and collaboration platform because of its ease-of-use, low cost, and flexibility.

Value of narratives: Having narratives generated by client and coach makes the part of the process itself rather than peripheral as meeting notes often are. Understanding is enhanced by each round of messages. Errors can be corrected as the process evolves.

Process threads: Most coaching processes, at least in my experience, tend to raise several issues as the process goes along. Some can be separated for handling by other means but a typical process is likely to have several issues (topics) active simultaneously. Slack, through its “channels” feature, is an ideal way to keep these separate.