Strategic Action Plan For Companies During Uncertainty

How to make your business thrive in the next crisis

Four rectangles forming a folded paper shape and a tiger image

If you are responsible for the strategic direction of your business and you are now wondering what steps will make your company more resilient, this article is for you.

A brief introduction: I’m Krasi, a former product development director and now a founder of Owtcome, a boutique agency, helping companies on the journey from a minimum viable product to commercial success. I want to share a few of our methods of how we work with clients to help them navigate the uncertain landscapes.

As the world turned upside down and everything suddenly changed, it became clear that what once worked is no longer suited for our new reality. This moment is unique because it presents an excellent opportunity to reset business focus, strategic priorities, and partnership plans.

Sometimes, we need a crisis to make the hard, necessary, future-defining decisions.

Why does your company need a strategic crisis action plan? In my opinion, there are three essential reasons to take strategic planning seriously and prepare well for what is coming next:

1. Movement is growth — if we keep a close eye on the trends, we can anticipate change and act fast. If the pandemic impacts your business, now is the time to refine your vision and begin solving new problems for your customers. If your market disappeared, use this pause to assess your core company competencies that you can apply in another sector. If you reshape your business towards new opportunities, it will only become more resilient and robust.
2. State of readiness — we must identify uncertainties to prepare a better business response. Now is the time to figure out how to serve a narrower customer segment with absolute perfection. But if you must face reality and acknowledge that your struggling product isn’t working, that is ok. Just don’t avoid making tough decisions. Often, only radical change can help your company survive a crisis.
3. Be an out-thinker — we can adapt to the new reality if we never stop looking for better ways to serve our customers. As a leader, it is your responsibility to set an original path when there is no clear way ahead. Consider new ideas and explore non-traditional partnership opportunities. Or drastically redesign your product offering to address changing needs. Constraints are not bad, as they help you innovate, think, and act, only differently.

Strategic action plan in 5 steps to respond to future uncertainties

At Owtcome, we use a simple method of five steps to guide companies in their strategic planning journey. Crisis planning doesn’t have to overwhelm you or slow you down with complex models and extensive preparation. We have created some simple tools that you can use and easily integrate into your strategic decision process.

Step 1: Key current and future trends

The first step of strategic planning is to start monitoring essential trends that impact your industry. For the near-term, having the right granularity with weekly and monthly updates will allow you to keep a good pulse on the changes.

Some of the key trends that we monitor at the moment are: what the impact will be when businesses re-open in June; what economic stimuli plans countries are putting in place to fight COVID-19; where are venture capital investments at the moment despite the pandemic, etc. For the near and longer-term, we keep track of the 1.5m separation economy and new safety regulations, the likelihood of a second wave of lock-downs before the end of the year, how companies prioritize cash, investments in automation, biotech, and collaboration tools, etc.

Step 2: Assess your starting position

The second step is to assess your business initiatives as a starting position: financial assumptions, ongoing activities, and strategic choices. We recommend mapping current projects in one of three categories: right (initiatives that are still relevant despite the crisis), wrong (initiatives that no longer work), and unsure (initiatives with a high level of uncertainty).

This overview will give you a holistic understanding of the critical business areas to quickly identify where to make changes.

Step 3. Introduce a matrix of uncertainty

The goal in this step is to turn uncertainty into risk, which is easier to manage. We recommend the following process to construct the matrix of uncertainty. As a result, you will overcome biases and broaden the understanding of the changes:

1. Start with a list of high-level trends (social, economic, and technological). You may have already identified some trend patterns in step 1.
2. Consider expanding the list with adjacent trends (the ones that are not directly visible in your sector).
3. Pick two trends to create different scenarios.
4. Prioritize four to five plausible outcomes (you will need those for Step 4).

Step 4. Identify the right strategic move for your business

In the next step of the planning, you will determine the right strategic move for the next six months by assessing levels of disruption in your industry and customer demand. To do that, we will use the prioritized outcomes from Step 3 and put them into one of the three strategic responses:

• Save your business with restructuring
• Shift your current business model to new market
• Shape your business entirely into a new business

We recommend that you revisit the strategic move positioning often based on the level of disruption in your industry.

Note: There is no fourth state. Avoid getting nostalgic and attached to a business-as-usual mindset. The past is the past.

Step 5. Determine the right trigger points and actions

If you have made it that far, you are nearly at the end of the strategic planning journey. In the final step, you will determine the triggers for change and the appropriate actions to respond to the crisis.

Triggers could be either internal or external. For example, what influences internal triggers are changes to customer acquisition, retention, and monetization model. If they are shifting unexpectedly, revisit your current strategic position. The external triggers are either high-level trends or adjacent trends. Monitor if they intensify or if a new pattern emerges.

Actions: once you prioritize the right strategic move, revisit the list of initiatives from Step 2. Does the assigned position (right, wrong, unsure) still make sense? If not, adjust if necessary. It is useful to map the whole list of the initiatives into one of the three strategic moves (Save, Shift, or Shape). It will give you a portfolio of actions that you can trigger relatively fast when another crisis comes.

Summary

By now, you can probably guess what my recommendation will be: the crisis is a precious opportunity for anyone that can adapt, so take the time to put your plan in place. I hope you will make the best out of the current situation and apply as many different lenses as it takes to turn your business into a more robust company.