What’s Next? Saving 2020

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Congratulations on getting through the past three weeks! We’ve just been through the early days of the biggest social and economic disruption of the last 50 years. We don’t have a rule book, so we’ve been figuring it out as we go along.

Honestly, many of us have been focused solely on what’s in front of us, on what’s happening today and tomorrow. That’s completely normal in this kind of situation. Unfortunately, that’s not enough. These aren’t normal times. Now that we’ve started to settle in, we should be asking ourselves “Now what?”

We need to be thinking about how we will pivot to save Q2, where we need to be six months from now, and how we will be ready to succeed when we are at the next new normal. 

It’s not either focus on today or focus on what’s ahead. We need to do both – focus on today and prepare for what’s next.

Managing that balance – between today and the future – doesn’t have to be a daunting task. Engaging your team for just a few hours a week to start with will have a huge payoff. Emotionally, it will help people feel there is a greater purpose. They will have a sense of control over the future. It will also give your business a significant competitive advantage. You will be positioned and ready to restart as soon as you’re able, putting you ahead of the game.

 

Here are some ideas to get you started: 

1. Set Expectations. Tell everyone that we all are responsible for adapting as rapidly as possible to changes – not just as individuals but as a team and a business. Survival and future success depends on it. We are all in this together.

2. Keep Everyone Focused on the customer, employees and what they can control.

3. Engage Everyone In the Conversation. Certain people may carry through on the tasks that come out of the conversations, but great ideas will come from everywhere.

4. Set up a cadence for communication. What was your cadence up to this point for team and individual meetings. Keep that. What else do you need to add? This is a rapidly changing situation. At a minimum, daily updates, should be the norm until the pace of disruption slows down. The length of the updates can change, but the regularity shouldn’t change abruptly.

5. Ask Pivot Questions. These questions get us out of our normal way of thinking about a situation. They could be questions like:

  • What if we could start from scratch? What would we do?
  • What are our customers going to need when the economy rebounds?
  • How would someone in another industry approach this
  • Why this and not that?
  • If you were CEO /head of the business unit / functional EVP for one day, what would you do?
  • What are our assumptions? What is the complete opposite?

6. Develop Potential Scenarios based on answers to the questions.

7. Create a Regular Cadence of future-focused conversations – at least once a week for an hour.

This situation isn’t permanent. It will end, even if it doesn’t feel that way. But it will be different. You and your team should start creating that future now.

Are you ready to focus on what’s next? Do you need some help figuring out how to get your teams to pivot?

Call us at 1.978.475.8424 or email us: e.onderickharvey@nextbridgeconsulting.com.