The Strategy to Survive the Worst Case Scenario

How pessimism can save your business

In recent years we have all been accustomed to being motivated, positive, and always seeing the bright side of things. Coaches teach us to aim high and target increasingly important goals to reach in order to motivate us to grow and improve.

All very nice, but is that really enough to have a functional growth plan?

The strategy

A good strategy is the one that tells you step by step how to get from point A to point B, it is that Linus blanket you always keep close in case of the unexpected, and it is that flashlight that turns on when the generator fails. All very poetic, but how do you get to have this holy grail of business management?

By breaking down your business piece by piece and studying everything that could happen in the near future that might affect how it performs.

It is wonderful to have big goals, but to reach them you should make peace with yourself and analyze the starting point of the business carefully to understand what steps are necessary to achieve our big goals.

Let us say your goals are the top of a mountain (original, right?) and you have to start from home. Not having a strategy means setting off without a map, in flip-flops, with a 1L bottle and a pack of crackers with the goal of getting closer to the summit in the most direct and fastest way possible.

Having a strategy does not mean only having a map, but also knowing the route, the timelines, the risks you might encounter (and being prepared), the awareness that the straightest road is not necessarily the best one, and all the resources needed to face the entire journey safely.

Worst Case Scenario

To make strategy you have to be surgeons and pessimists.

Surgeons is simple: to plan what is needed to get there, you have to be fully aware of "where you are starting from", so you need a detailed knowledge of the current state of your business.

But why do I say you have to be pessimists?

I will answer with a question: imagine telling someone about your big goals full of enthusiasm and hearing them reply "yes all very nice, but what if the dollar collapses?", how would you define that person?

Let us say this is an exaggerated example, but the strategist's job is also this: try to anticipate the most likely risks in the sector and prepare as much as possible in advance.

Now, if the dollar collapses I would say the problems are elsewhere, but there can be serious things over which we have no direct control (see the Covid pandemic), just as relatively less serious and more likely things can happen, for example a competitor launching an identical product to ours, before we do.

In our work we are obliged, during project analysis, to "dismantle the enthusiasm" in order to understand how much, if, and how the goals are achievable, only then can you truly become aware of what you will be facing over the coming years of work.

Hope for the best, prepare for the worst

Keeping your motivation high, as well as that of the team, is essential for a project to succeed, but you also have to hedge your bets and be aware that it will not always be a walk in the park.

Strategy is a fact, it is a guide, you can always look at it again, reread it, adjust it, and improve it; a goal is intangible, distant and hazy, and no matter how beautiful it is, the mere desire to get there will hardly be enough to reach it. Then sometimes it happens, business history has great examples of brands that arrived at the right moment, in the right place, at the right time and shot into hyperspace, but you will agree with me that they are not the norm.

We always hope for the best and we will always put 100% of our effort into creating a plan that reaches the finish line, but we will also always be prepared to handle the worst case scenario in the best possible way.