A Global pandemic. Civil Unrest. Economic turmoil. 2020 taught us just how susceptible we are to surprise and disruption. With as much uncertainty as we experienced last year, it was nearly impossible to complete the year without a core realization: We should not focus on predicting the future but instead become resilient to anything that might happen. 

The antidote to the uncertainty that 2021 will bring is resilience – three levels of pliability that are must-haves for navigating this year and beyond. It is useful to have any one of these but to thrive and prosper; you need all three. Scenario planning is the process through which you and your executive team can approach resilience collectively, deliberately, and systematically.

Let’s explore the three levels of resilience since we know that “set it and forget it” will not work as a strategy. Then, see how scenario planning offers immunity to the negative impacts of the unknown while creating the conditions for success.  

First, there is strategic resilience. You’ve got to make decisive choices, create new options, and have flexible strategies that respond to the full range of uncertainties. To do that, you need a clear view of the context surrounding your business and industry and a structured way to understand the forces you could potentially face. Those companies that planned for multiple scenarios for how the pandemic would unfold thrived in 2020 – the businesses that supported virtual working, the restaurants that pivoted to take-out, and the healthcare providers that turned their focus to COVID responses. Companies that did not adjust their strategies failed as quickly as those who only cut costs without pivoting strategically. Scenario planning provides you and your leaders a framework to understand what could happen, coupled with clear strategies for how you would respond under different conditions. 

The second is relational resilience. You have to operate as a team, as a partner, as a vendor, in new contexts. How do relationships change when the context shifts so dramatically? Companies that prosper determine how to meet customers’ emerging needs, and those who re-configure relationships with vendors get their supply chains filled. And it’s the companies that maintain relationships and connections with their teams that bring on new talent and maintain high-quality strategic dialogue, even while “Zooming” from their living rooms, home offices, and bedrooms. Scenario planning helps leaders cultivate strategic dialogue, forward momentum, and connection despite the ambiguity.

And finally, there is emotional resilience. At any moment in 2020, we felt hope, spaciousness, and connection while also feeling fearful, anxious, and outraged. Those who have an emotional resilience practice and an ability to look inside can adapt to conditions while not being overly reactive. You and your leaders need a systematic way to de-personalize highly emotional issues so that decision making can be made clearly and cleanly. So constant pivots don’t lead to burn-out and wasted resources.

Scenario planning is a helpful tool for cultivating all three levels of resilience. The primary use case for scenario planning is to identify futures that your company should plan for. It provides a structured framework for navigating the unknown and is an alternative to prediction and forecasting what could be, rather than what will be. Because scenario planning is done in teams, it inherently allows for building and nurturing relationships and a shared awareness through structured strategic dialogue. And finally, scenario planning gives the team a sense of comfort because it allows them to grapple with the unknown rather than bury it and pretend it’s not there. In short, scenario planning brings harmony to the age-old conflict between fighting with and fleeing from reality.

Companies that leveraged Trium’s scenario planning toolkit in 2020 were able to develop short-term strategies to navigate the global pandemic. Now is the time to turn to the longer-term strategies, structural forces, and bigger choices businesses face as the pandemic, civil unrest, and economic turmoil continue. As you prepare for 2021 and beyond, instead of trying to predict a single future, and instead of trying to pretend that the future will look something like it does today, why not look at the full range of possibilities? Roleplay and imagine what it will take to win – and then create the conditions for success.

Scenario planning fits into almost any strategic planning process and can be done relatively quickly. The outcomes are revolutionary and fundamentally different from any other strategy process because it targets all three resilience levels. Scenario planning creates the possibility for leadership teams to win no matter what conditions they face. And along the way, it helps people feel connected to one another, connected to the future, and to see new opportunities they otherwise wouldn’t have.

Winston Churchill famously said, “It’s always wise to look ahead… but difficult to look further than you can see.”

Difficult? Yes. But even in times of disruption, uncertainty, and challenge it is undeniably possible to see the future…or more accurately, the “futures.” I’m not talking about an apocryphal, crystal ball vision of the future, or even a linear prediction model, but rather the type of strategic foresight that gives a glimpse into what could be so that companies and their leaders are better prepared to respond to and/or shape the future.

This kind of foresight, gained through structured methodologies like scenario planning, requires a strategy mindset – a belief that optimism, integrated and holistic thinking, peripheral vision, outside-in analysis, and team alignment creates exponential opportunity – and thus, it’s worth the effort.

Why is a Strategy Mindset so Important?
Leaders with a strategy mindset believe they have agency over the future despite, or maybe even because of, all of the ambiguity they face. They see around corners. They see possibilities and choices where others see problems and constraints. They place smart bets when others are fighting, flighting, or stalling.

To manage the influx of disruption, seize opportunities, and even create the next unicorn, executives need to systematically expand the boundaries of their understanding, gather more insight, and ultimately synthesize faster so they can integrate risks and opportunities into courageous strategies. Of course, they need to do all of this while making smart short-term and operational choices.

A strategy mindset starts with asking the right questions:

• In what multiple ways could the future unfold?
• Which forces are in our control and which are not?
• What is the full range of choices our company faces?

Rather than driving immediate and actionable solutions, addressing these questions sparks depth, exploration, strategic dialogue, and transformative thinking. It demands that leaders flex a different set of muscles than they are used to.

That’s why strategy today is more than a skillset. Strategy is a mindset – a set of beliefs about how to find and execute on opportunities, supported by a way of being that enables expansiveness, accountability, and engagement.

The 5 Elements of a Strategy Mindset

Often when a leader achieves short-term results repeatedly, they balk against long-term planning. Why fix it if it isn’t broken? A strategy mindset doesn’t negate the need for both nimble thinking and focusing on this quarter’s results…it simply enhances your ability to approach all planning with a more strategic lens. Understanding the five key elements is the first step in being able to nurture and adopt a strategy mindset.

1. Taking the long view – While the past offers critical lessons and the present is where decisions get made, a long-term future orientation opens up choice and possibility because it is unimpeded by all of the limitations of the present reality. In making decisions, do you start from the unconstrained opportunities the future offers and work backward to determine your choices or begin with a more confined and “realistic” set of options?
2. Starting from the context – Outside-in thinkers look for opportunities and threats in the contextual environment (social, technological, political, economical, and increasingly epidemiological forces), before narrowing in on the decisions they do control. Do you systematically consider the impact of forces you don’t control or focus more directly on those forces you do control?
3. Challenging the conventional wisdom – Long-established, familiar ideas and routines breed predictability, certainty, and often times unrivaled rigidity. They are the enemy of innovation and disruption unless they are challenged by multiple competing plausible scenarios. Do you depend on an implicit understanding of your core business assumptions or do you explicitly surface and interrogate the assumptions to determine which ones are based on habits and which are well-grounded?
4. Making sense through synthesis – There’s generally more data, information, and insight to process than time available to interpret or act on it. This creates a need to separate the signal from the noise in order to rapidly infuse a broad range of information without ignoring key information. Do you rely on a small set of credible and dependable sources to inform your view or do you systematically scan, synthesize, and process information from a broad array of inputs?
5. Being purposefully optimistic – Positivity and an optimistic outlook transform challenges into opportunities and victims into responsible leaders. It is the foundation of a solution orientation, offering a wide range of viable and attractive choices. Are you generally focused on risks, concerns, and the threat of loss or opportunities, upside, and potential wins?

The idea of a strategy mindset is easily understood but learning how to cultivate one is the journey all great leaders must go on. Take this 2-minute quiz and instantly get feedback on what kind of mindset you currently have and how to nurture it for best results.

If this pandemic has taught us anything, it’s that we live in a VUCA world – we are experiencing volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity in unprecedented ways. And we are finally talking about it. 

Fueled by ambition, fear, or pragmatism, this pandemic’s massive disruption to the ordinary course of things has led to every organization shifting its strategy in some meaningful way. We have published extensively on the benefits of using scenario planning to make sense of and plan for disruption, and we’ve written about some of the more powerful no-regrets strategies that position companies for sustained success.  

As companies have made strategic pivots, their employees have demonstrated flexibility and resilience while working from home and juggling competing responsibilities. Never has our physical and mental health been more critical to our well-being. Yet we’ve noticed a systematic under-investment in one of the most critical levers for sustained corporate success — leadership team health. 

Healthy Teams Enable Rapid Scale

It’s well understood that to scale in any business climate, companies need a stellar strategy – an extraordinary product-market fit, a winning business model, and a differentiated approach to the market. Yet, success hinges on having a leadership team with strong execution capacity even with all of these things in place. That is, the ability to make high-quality decisions faster and more often than competitors. And the key to execution capacity is leadership team health. 

Healthy leadership teams share these attributes:

• They are aligned on their “why,” that is their shared purpose individually and as a team
• They are clear on their “what,” their vision of where they are headed
• They embrace a coordinated “how” by being committed to a shared roadmap, an operating system, and principles that guide them 
• They have a deep understanding of who they are individually, where their strengths and gaps are, and they are skilled at optimizing one another

With all of that in place – designed for the company’s people and strategy – they learn, grow, and scale together successfully.  

When strategies change, and leaders are under more pressure than usual like in this moment, it’s time to check in on leadership team health. Because, more often than not, managing through disruption increases team health debt that, let’s face it, in many organizations was already higher than it should have been. 

Team Health Debt

By team health debt, we mean mounting dynamics, such as conversations that never happen but should; decision-making that takes place in siloes; low levels of transparency; and low-quality dialogues when they do happen.

Teams suffering from team health debt might be very nice to each other – so nice that they don’t have the difficult strategic or personal conversations needed to succeed. They might find themselves in long, belabored, or meandering conversations that feel like they demonstrate transparency, but slow decision-making. Or, they might find themselves so busy focusing on the day-to-day, that they are tuning out, phoning it in, or otherwise disengaging from the level of relational development that is essential to mobilize strategy collectively.

The challenge of team health debt, like tech debt, is that it is not always a visible issue to all team members, despite its devastating impact. But once it’s paid back, the team can move to a higher level of performance, strategy execution, and even joy.

Unnecessary Tensions

It is essential to stay current on your team health payments. When you postpone a meeting to collaborate or deprioritize a tough conversation or don’t have the hard-hitting collaborative meeting to solve big strategic problems, you default, therefore incurring more team health debt. Teams who invest the time to be with one another, and take on the difficult dialogues not only pay down the debt but find themselves in a surplus where innovation and breakthroughs occur.

The easiest way to know if your team is suffering from high levels of team health debt is to look at how you address strategy and execution. Unhealthy teams see the world in black and white terms. They see binary choices where they don’t exist. And so, factions form, individuals, dig their heels in, and the quality of decision making suffers. On unhealthy teams, these misunderstood tensions are seen as trade-offs. They are not discussed openly, but exist just below the surface and toxify the team—slowing execution, causing poor decision making, and killing morale.   

Product vs. go-to-market. Should you focus on technology and product development, as you did in the early days of the company, or on revenue generation? Of course, the answer is both, but if executives argue over resource allocation, roadmap clarity, or critical metrics and measurements, it’s likely that the underlying tension is unstated, over-rotation by essential leaders toward one side the other of this spectrum.

Autonomy vs. collaboration. As hiring ramps up – whether from 10 to 50 people or from 200 to 500 people – there’s a desire to ensure freedom and also address issues more holistically. If executives argue about roles, decision rights, and swim lanes or cross-functional decisions are delayed or made poorly, your team is likely stuck in this false choice.  

Culture vs. growth. If your team asks, “How do we preserve our culture while we grow?” you’re probably not as clear as you should be about the company’s values, operating principles, and how individuals are empowered to live into them. In extreme circumstances, culture and growth are seen as trade-offs, which will undermine both. 

Patience v.s action. “We need a bias toward action.” Or, “We have to be patient with the strategy, let the team do its job, and trust the process.” What if both are true? What if teams could discuss the areas where they should be patient and compare them to the places where the action is necessary?

Healthy teams see these tensions as opportunities for strategic dialogue and realities that can be optimized. They take a both/and approach rather than an either/or approach to resolving tensions – that is, they work together to understand how to get the best from both sides of the tension. 

Imagine a team that has paid off its team health debt systematically, and has clear decision rights, structures, and agreements about which issues require urgency and require patience. Imagine a team that brings difficult conversations to the fore, resolves them, and builds relationships. Imagine a team with an updated simple, clear, and co-created purpose, vision, roadmap, and operating plan. How much more quickly could it scale? How much more fun could it be? What will be unleashed?

The Prescription

There are three core areas companies can focus on to improve team health, and to have a fast impact on strategy execution.  

1. Individual Leadership — It all starts with individual leaders. Every executive leader should know their strengths and values and be clear about their areas of growth. They should see these continually evolving and be invested in exploring them in collaboration with others on the team. Each leader mastering their code builds both confidence and humility – necessary conditions for successful leadership. 
2. Team Cohesion – Next comes team relationships. In a pandemic world where 5-star dinners, trust falls, and offsites are impossible, there’s an opportunity to focus on the deeper foundations of relationship – trust, vulnerability, and connection. When teams are wedded at a deeper level, they can more rapidly address issues, which means problems are discussed earlier and resolved more quickly, and better solutions are found. Updating the core foundations of a team in response to the pandemic – values, purpose, vision, roadmap, strengths, and operating systems – has the dual impact of providing a strategic or intellectual upgrade and doing so in a way that promotes strategic dialogue and builds connection. 
3. Team Operating System — Just like computers, teams have operating systems that govern their functionality. In most cases, that operating system is not explicit – the rules are unclear for how the most important work gets done. We believe every team should design an operating system that identifies: the cadence of strategic and tactical meetings, the metrics or objectives, and key results (OKRs) to pay attention to; the rhythms and processes to ensure execution success; and the agreed-upon principles. With this operating system in place, the formula for strategy execution is transparent and continuously refined.

Improving Team Health During the Pandemic

The pandemic has shaken up strategies and execution. It’s an excellent time to ask whether you’ve sufficiently tended to team health–and whether there’s an opportunity to reduce team health debt during this moment of societal innovation, flexibility, and forgiveness.

By Doug Randall and Annette Templeton. Annette Templeton is a Partner at The Trium Group. For more than 20 years, she has helped individuals and organizations optimize performance through a transformative, strengths-based approach. She is an expert in developing effective cross-cultural business teams and implementing large-scale transformation programs across various industries. 

This is the third in a series of articles about developing strategy in a post-coronavirus world. The four scenarios for a post-coronavirus and an open-source strategy toolkit can be downloaded here.

What do courageous leaders do in times of jaw-dropping uncertainty? They set a vision, make strategic decisions, align teams, and communicate. Our responsibilities didn’t change when the global pandemic hit — when we began to realize just how unpredictable the world is.

Decision Making with Conviction
Despite all the tantalizing forces pushing toward states of paralysis and denial, an increasing number of leaders are settling into this time by embracing a new reality. They recognize that the present and the short, medium, and long-term futures are highly uncertain. They are making decisions with conviction – and finding the areas where bold action is warranted.

Now that employees are working from home, cash runways are managed as much as possible, and businesses are tuned to this fits-and-starts moment, where are the most advanced leaders focused? On no-regrets moves – actions that make sense in any future – as well as on bigger bets that are tied to clear signals from the world they don’t control.

Here is a set of no-regrets moves we see companies take across industries. While you are likely to have some that are highly specific to your situation, these eight moves tend to be applicable across the board. Of course, all of these moves have a cost associated with them. The question for leaders is, will they provide a disproportionate advantage for your business?

1. Go direct to customers

With the retail shutdown, businesses gained permission to connect with their customers more directly. PepsiCo’s new site, Snacks.com, is an example of a large company circumnavigating traditional supermarket channels to sell their product directly to consumers. Over the long-term, this reduces costs and allows Pepsi significantly more customer data and intimacy, a goal that was in place long before coronavirus. How might you get closer to your customers during this time?

2. Focus marketing on stability, care, and resilience

The tenor of marketing has changed, and it’s essential to stay attuned. Companies that remain tone-deaf by continuing to deliver messaging that is too self-serving will drive customers away. A movie studio promoting darker themes re-calibrated its marketing at the outset of the pandemic to bring hope and inspiration to American movie audiences. A B2B software company that focused its messaging on growth and technology innovation during the bull market has re-tooled its selling points around stability, resiliency, and cost savings. Is your positioning well aligned with the needs and sentiment of today’s marketplace and robust enough to evolve as times change?

3. Invest in landing new customers

While some businesses are targeting incremental revenue from existing customers as they reduce customer acquisition spend, several enterprise software companies are taking the opposite stance. By offering solutions to problems consumers are facing – in the form of extended payment terms, price reductions, and other arrangements – these companies are taking business from less-resourced competitors. They will ultimately emerge from this crisis in a stronger market position. This strategy’s second punch will be an M&A spree of those companies who retrenched. How can you best ensure that you are seeding the future growth of your business and positioning your organization to end up on the right side of the buying spree that will emerge?

4. Accelerate business model transformation

Where there’s an impending need, organizations that have been contemplating a business model shift are using this moment to accelerate the change, and frequently leveraging technology and the cloud to help them. One example is Southern New Hampshire University (SNHU). As pressure has mounted on private universities over the past decade due to increased tuition costs, inequitable access, and a wholesale questioning of the value of four-year degrees, SNHU announced it would no longer accept students to its traditional campus programs. They are offering 100% tuition scholarship for online degrees, thus making themselves more affordable than many public four year colleges. This bold move accelerates a migration plan they had in place by several years. In a poignant note, SNHU President Paul LeBlanc called this a “burn the boats” moment. We see similar shifts in the technology sector, where these companies are taking this moment to accelerate their shift to the cloud, moving from selling products to services, and benefiting from the recurring revenue models to go with that shift. Are there opportunities to advance your technological journey to support future growth while meeting the cost containment demands of today?

5. Follow the money

For the most part, sales teams are targeting industries expected to emerge from the crisis as winners, such as technology, pharma, and government and moving away from (or betting on the most prominent consolidators/premium players in) travel, education, and real estate. They’re focusing more on big, stable, and resourced companies and less on small and medium-sized businesses. And, they’re shifting geographically too, to diversify their risks as the pandemic continues its varied path of impact around the globe. Are you able to effectively capture the growing white space in the SMB segment or positioned to win with the largest companies who matter most?

6. Build supply chains that are resilient to disruption

Efficiency often comes at the cost of resiliency. In a volatile environment, with a significant risk of delays, tariffs, and potential trade wars, businesses are building more redundancy and flexibility into their supply chains. A food importer who sells branded products in supermarkets is shoring up supplies from multiple countries, ramping production, and building inventory to keep their products moving. Sales are up 300%. Other large organizations are turning to automation to address the risks of having humans onsite and the potential supply chain shutdowns that can incur if teams get sick or are locked down again. How effectively can your company deliver if the pandemic sustains well into 2021?

7. Decentralize spans of control

As Mayors have usurped political capital, there’s a similar shift toward localization in corporate decision making. One global retailer is empowering its store managers to work directly with local governments, shopping malls, and nearby communities to meet needs and develop creative solutions for re-engaging in commerce. This move will undoubtedly lead to new products, services, and opportunities for this progressive retailer. How will you leverage decentralization to improve your agility and optimize your business to local conditions given the pandemic?

8. Optimize your virtualized business

Just as companies are getting accustomed to collaborating remotely, sales teams are figuring out new virtual sales motions, educators are creating long-term learning modalities, and restaurateurs are developing new safe-haven concepts. A global commercial real estate company is launching a new hybrid e-commerce/virtual shopping experience that was in the works long before coronavirus. The winners in the virtual world are rethinking “how” they do what they do. Moving traditional business approaches into video calls is a short term bandaid. How are you rethinking the virtual world to your advantage versus being held back by its constraints?

Companies that emerge more strongly will have thoughtfully approached scenario planning. Indeed, in these most uncertain days, the only thing that can be counted on is that nothing is guaranteed. But employing a scenario planning strategy will help companies prepare for any number of possible futures.

An Enterprise Software Company’s Approach
Puppet, an industry-leading software automation company, used scenario planning to develop a robust coronavirus response strategy, including a set of customized no-regrets moves. As soon as the pandemic hit, Puppet’s CEO Yvonne Wassenaar challenged her executive team:

“We need to understand what this means for our customers – what will technology leaders such as VPs of Infrastructure and Automation, CTOs, engineering leaders, and CIOs need to enable their companies to survive these uncertain times and be positioned as leaders in their industries regardless of what emerges from this crisis?”

After defining four potential future scenarios and what they would mean for Puppet’s customers and their operations, the leadership team designed a bold strategy. According to Wassenaar, they immediately refined their product roadmap to support their large enterprise customers’ most advanced security and remote network needs.

They shifted their marketing investments and tailored their messages to best resonate with relevant current day customer challenges. Puppet shifted its go-to-market model and prepared its workforce for a long-term virtual reality, including accelerating the build-out of remote services and investing in employee home offices. In recognition that some of their strategic choices are dependent on which future they’ll face, Wassenaar created a set of external triggers that will evoke strategies as they evolve. For example, if the economy grows by a certain percent, they anticipate an uptick in business digitalization and the mass adoption of DevOps, which will trigger an increased investment in their cloud-native efforts.

Wassenaar and her team found so much value in the scenario planning process they now provide a technology-centric version of the open-source toolkit for their customers. They’re helping Puppet customers identify no-regret moves that enable action today and set the foundation for future success as any number of potential futures emerge.

Bold Action
Many of these no-regrets moves and strategies were imagined well before the pandemic and are universally good ones to consider. Their boldness comes from a conviction to act – to respond proactively to the market, business models, and related pressures that may have already been there. As humanity, we may lack clarity for what is on the horizon, but as business leaders, we can – and must – make plans with confidence that we have considered a broad range of possible futures. Perhaps leaders are merely following the sage advice of Winston Churchill, “Never let a good crisis go to waste.”