Are you ready?

It's a new year, and it's going to be an exciting year! As we plan the year, part of our thinking about the new year must be thinking about what else could happen. Experience has taught us over the past few years that what we think will happen is often not what does happen.

And I don't know about you, but sometimes I worry about things that I can't predict.

And that's where being ready helps. What does "Ready" look like?

1. Be Aware
2. Be Prepared
3. Be Adaptive
4. Be Practiced

One of the things that I like to think about as a business person and someone who leads teams is being able to respond to situations quickly and confidently. What I don't want to do is be trapped in a reactive (non-discretionary) cycle of actions. I want to be proactive and create my Outcomes by having pre-prepared responses (considered and appropriate) and actions to guide us to an outcome.

Outcome = Event + Reaction + Response

I can't predict the future. I don't know what's coming. But I want to be ready for whatever comes, and that's where crisis preparation comes into play.

Crisis preparation doesn't mean that we are Doomsday Preppers or overt pessimists. Preparation means having your systems of work, thinking structures, decision frameworks and default plans in place that will allow you to deal with whatever comes along. Some powerful approaches can help us in getting ready and being prepared.

1. Be Aware - Situational Awareness

The first challenge is recognising that what you are experiencing is abnormal. Or what is happening is outside your expectations, and your current approach won't work. Then we must classify it as how far outside the norm we are. We must think about where we are deviating from where we want to be. This will be your trigger to move into situation or event management.

Recognition and responding as early as possible is crucial in crafting your successful outcome.

Start with the end in mind; understand the desired target state and orient against that. Are we there yet? And if we are there, if we are on the right track or not, if we are not on the right track, what do we need to do about it? And then what we need to do about it depends on how far off track we are. The further off-track you are, the more likely you are to find that you're in a crisis state.

To be ready, you need to look ahead at your value streams, look for knock-on effects of world and local events and then correlate that to your context. Ask, "What does that mean to me?" when aware of your situation. Tools like PESTLE analysis can help with this situational awareness and contextual impact analysis.

2. Be Prepared - Have a default "Go To" plan

You must move and do something if you are in a non-normal state. You need to move swiftly, and you need to do things. The key to an unexpected state is to own the narrative. You don't want to be driven by events and circumstances; you want to work within those events and circumstances to craft your future state. 

Set up default or preplanned activities to manage the cognitive load when you have detected a deviation. These can be as simple as a meeting, or they can be checklists of actions to be taken to begin the return to normal operations. The idea is to have a cascading list of decisions that will be made and nominate who will make them ahead of time, so when an event occurs, everyone just "knows" what to do next and who is going to do it.

The prepared or default plan allows you to avoid paralysis and confusion in the early stages of an event, while gathering data to make informed decisions.

3. Be Adaptive - Regular Course Corrections

Once you move to the response state, you must continually refine your approach to return to optimal operations. 

Regular planning and feedback cycles with impact analysis built into your approach make adaptation and continual informed response possible. Frequent feedback loops and the psychological safety in the teams to tell the truth to authority. Building awareness of the target state by sharing the Strategic Goals and organisational intentions openly creates alignment and clarity, helping everyone understand when there is a deviation from expected outcomes.

4. Be Practiced - Train for the Failure State

Hypothesise Scenarios, Prepare Responses and Drill. Set yourself up for success as any high-performing team would. Navy seals or commandos, World-class athletes, Astronauts, and First Responders all practice and train for their events. In these environments, these teams practice their approaches, and they practice failure. They practice failure states, and they practice how they are going to navigate out of them. When planning for an exercise or an impediment, they double down on what could go wrong and create compound errors (errors on errors). These compound error situations allow them to really sharpen their skills. In the corporate world, we need to do workshops, regular drills, tabletop exercises, and immersive activities to explore the dynamics that will emerge during any challenging situation.

We can't do it on paper; we need to act it out. We need to understand the human dynamics associated with any challenging situation and relieve the players' cognitive load inside that particular dynamic so that they're not trying to understand everything all at once by creating pre-prepared crisis plans. Have some pre-prepared drills and have the "go-to" actions laid out. Pre-planning means reducing the cognitive load when you need the maximum ability to understand what's happening, orient yourself, and make informed, data-driven decisions. Being prepared is the key.

So how do you get "Ready"? You can do several things to set yourself and your teams up for success. You will have to get the key players together; you need to workshop your scenarios and lean into the challenges associated with the unknown. We find this very, very uncomfortable.

Most people are working very hard to avoid ambiguity and uncertainty. We need to pay attention to the uncertainty and focus on how to create an environment where we can deal with uncertainty but still navigate with purpose and direction towards our target state. Running these workshops by doing the prep work and by establishing the drills makes it much easier for you and your teams to lean into any situation, any adverse environment and any challenge that appears, and you may even be able to harness these challenges and turn them into opportunities.