Never waste a good crisis — part 4— Why crises help us challenge assumptions
Never waste a good crisis — part 4— Why crises help us challenge assumptions
Why does a crisis help us challenge our assumptions? How could we 'bottle' this for us in normal times?
What a crisis teaches us about planning & prioritisation
What can this teach us when thinking about Product development? I will walk through the concepts and takeaways that this live example of COVID-19, which touches every business and every consumer, can teach us.
Start part 1 here:
Why crises help us challenge assumptions
So how can a crisis help us challenge assumptions? A variation of this question is ‘why do organisations allow assumptions to go unchallenged until a crisis?’.
I mentioned certainty and concreteness before. A bias that seems to me under-acknowledged when it comes to warping optimal prioritisation for businesses is Certainty bias — the bias that when presented with options with differing levels of uncertainty suggests people will generally opt for the more certain option — possibly aligned with the adage of “a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush”.
Today’s enterprise organisations are still largely captive to outdated ways of working. The approaches to budgeting and planning in many organisations in practice do not align with widely agreed-on good practices. Whilst pockets of most organisations can demonstrate adoption of modern work practices, the areas of an organisation most responsible for operational practices and work environments are less likely to have adopted these.
Most significantly, observing described practices for planning, project management, and budgeting IT, HR and Executive Leadership are the most culpable parties — I suspect this is because these functions have been traditionally defined by the activities they are responsible for — a big risk for businesses in volatile times where the risk linked to not changing arguably now outweighs the risks associated with changes.
‘why do organisations allow assumptions to go unchallenged until a crisis?’
If a crisis illuminates what is important, by what we see in the changes required to overcome it, then what could help us achieve the same during ordinary times? In my experience, without manufacturing a crisis, there are a number of ways to simulate some of the clarity we experience in a crisis:
Clearly communicating goals
And why they matter
Having structured discussions of prioritisation
Measurement in place to understand position and progress
Defining the purpose for each part of the organisation, in detail
All of these can contribute to some of the same sorts of clarity we momentarily find in a crisis. We will cover all of these to some degree in this series but let’s focused on the last item for a moment.
Organisational functions, as we mentioned examples earlier, can get carried away with their own goals, losing sight of the present needs of the organisation. They forget their purpose and their role in fulfilling the purpose of the organisation. It helps to build clarity on what is required from all for the organisation to operate successfully.
We often operate with implicit assumptions about the purpose of things which when unexamined lead to faulty assumptions. Just the act of making these explicit and having conversations about them across groups can make clear investments that otherwise may have seemed nice to have or important, not urgent.
This brings us to another lesson: Being explicit and clear in the purpose of all parts of our organisation and how they add up to address the organisation’s purpose is important to optimal performance.
Next, I will look at how a crisis can be used by leaders to rally support:
Here is the series of posts where I tackle these questions:
