COVID-19: Building a Resilient Recovery
About the Authors:
Tracy Hatton
Joint Managing Director at Resilient Organisations Ltd
Tracy has extensive experience leading research and consulting projects focusing on organisational resilience and disaster preparedness and recovery, ensuring that high-quality research is converted into real solutions for organisational problems.
Charlotte Brown
Joint Managing Director at Resilient Organisations Ltd
Charlotte enjoys working in cross-disciplinary teams, tackling complex challenges in organisational resilience, risk management, decision-making, and systems thinking. She distils complex ideas in an accessible and engaging way.
If you have not already, now is the time to ensure your team is thinking strategically about recovery. It is easy to get overwhelmed with the response process and the complexities of adapting operations to our new normal. It is, however, vital for long term success to allow time for some strategic thinking.
If you are a small business owner, this means extracting yourself from the operations. If you are a larger organisation it may be helpful to assign a separate team to start thinking strategically about recovery for your organisation.
Resilient Recovery Planning Principles
Whilst there is still significant uncertainty as to how the pandemic will play out, planning at this stage requires adaptive decision making that evolves as uncertainty resolves.
Your planning framework needs to deliver a clear unity of purpose across decision making and operational teams – this is a complex and chaotic space which requires structure and process to help people navigate uncertainties.
Your forward thinking needs to springboard off existing planning , coupled with critical reflection on what needs to evolve, and creating the right conditions for new and innovative approaches to be tabled.
Resilient Recovery Planning Steps
1. Purpose and Values.
Define or reaffirm what lies at the heart of recovery for your organisation. This includes your core purpose or mission as an organisation, your vision and your values. This may include financial and non-financial objectives – such as community outcomes, staff wellbeing and reputation. These principles should be the guiding light and common thread that holds your strategic thinking together.
2. Strategic direction.
If you haven’t already, dust off and review your pre-COVID-19 strategy. Refresh yourself on what you were trying to achieve in the long term and the short and medium term actions you were taking to get there.
3. Situation awareness.
Take stock of the changed, and changing, environment around you. Take time to talk to key business partners, customers, suppliers and peak body groups. Are there emerging trends in your key market? What are competitors doing? Where are your suppliers located and what is happening there? Where are their suppliers located? What is the global economy doing? What could the economy do? Think as broadly as possible – as business disruptions can come from unusual places.
4. Possible futures.
Test your current strategy against a range of possible futures. None of us have a crystal ball. Too often we ‘lock on’ to a single perspective of what the future might look like and we design a strategy that works really well in that world. However, if the future is different to what we imagine, our strategy can be severely undermined.
Now that you have a good sense of what is happening, get creative and think of what could possibly happen in the future. Use the situation awareness you have developed to create 3-6 credible and diverse scenarios of what the future might look like.
For example reopening of NZ borders within 6 months; within 18 months; a significant resurgence of COVID-19 within NZ etc; wide permanent adoption of working from home. Base your scenarios around the factors that will influence your business the most.
Next, evaluate your current strategy against those scenarios. What works and what doesn’t work in each those scenarios? You want to prioritise actions that perform best across multiple possible futures, even if that decision is not optimised for our assumed future. For example, If pursuing a new type of customer works well in one scenario but not at all in another, you should consider how you can hedge your bets – potentially investing a little, but not putting all of your eggs in the one basket. And also ask, are there any opportunities in those futures that you haven’t currently included in your strategy?
5. Adaptive design.
Design a strategy that is deliberately flexible. Now you know the parts of your strategy that work best, and those vulnerable to disruption, it’s time to build some flexibility into your strategy. One way to do this is to develop a staged strategy with key decision points along the way. For each decision point think about alternate paths that could be taken if your initial strategy is no longer viable. Aim for strategic decisions that are equal part least regret and opportunity, and that maximise the diversity of your operations – be it the market you serve, the suppliers you use, or the staff you employ. Diversity can be an insurance policy for your business. Make sure that you recognise and act on opportunities that emerge from a crisis. It may mean you need to re-prioritise, defer or create new strategic aims.
6. Critical review.
Have some critical friends review your strategy. Organisations don’t operate in a vacuum. The success of their strategy depends on staff, current customers, potential customers, funders, shareholders, suppliers etc. So it is important that the strategy is reviewed in light of these diverse perspectives. You can do this yourself, or better yet, get some key partners to cast a critical eye over the strategy.
The review process should also be ongoing. Where possible, identify some triggers that might indicate you need to review your strategy. For example, if sales of a particular product reduce by 20% or if a competitor closes. Be prepared to review your plans frequently as new information comes to light and be prepared to change direction to avoid losses or to seize an opportunity.
Last but not least, don’t forget to bring your team along on the journey with you. They’ll have great ideas and will be more invested long term.
Joint Managing Directors
Resilient Organisations Ltd
021 160 7707 021 142 5420
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Deploying siloed tactics does not equate to purpose-driven strategy. This is as true in purpose-driven strategy as any other. While there is potential to deliver social impact this way, it can slip easily into “special projects” that organisations do on the side and the public is savvy in recognising authenticity.