Thoughts on Dealing With An Uncertain World

In my business life, I work with businesses and people who frequently have to deal with crisis and significant change. Outside of business, many of my contacts are dealing with significant changes and crises in their lives. I recently wrote an article on the subject and wanted to excerpt some of the key points for those of you who may be dealing with such events in your life

Managing Change

If you are a small player in a big world that is changing, how do you cope? How do you deal with these circumstances on a day-by-day basis and make the changes necessary? How do you deal with the unknown especially when you may be taking serious hits to your life right now?

Here is the outline.

1. Avoid Paralysis – Accept the necessity for action. Don’t let fear of the unknown negate all decision-making. This is because…

2. You Will Not Have All The Information – There’s too much going on. Even the academics, the ones who do nothing but study a situation, aren’t going to be able to figure out and enumerate every variable and how they will interact. You must…

3. Trust the 80-20 Rule – You don’t need every piece of information to get a sense of what is happening. We rarely do. It’s just that in more stable historical times it seems like we do. Make use of what you can get hold of and get your hands around and…

4. Do A Tactical Analysis – Whatever the direction you are going to go in, there will be a necessity to take action. In what directions will you need to direct that action? Will you need to cut costs? Will you need to add talents and capabilities that you lack? Will you need to redeploy personnel and physical assets so you are better postured? Once you have your tactical game plan you can…

6. Build an Action Plan – Your action plan has to break things down into detail. You must prioritize. The more in crisis you are, the more you must focus on the things necessary to keep the doors open and stay alive. Your action plan should be such that it creates a real punch list for you to do and for you to organize your scarce time and resources. Your action plan needs to be combined with…

7. Leadership, Confidence, and Focus on What’s Important – When all hell is breaking around you, when things seem dark, when you’re not sure if all the pieces are going to come together or whether it will all fall on top of you, a person who is going to survive the crisis has to eliminate the distractions of all the what-ifs, focus solely on what is essential to be done now, and give the leadership and confidence to those around them.