Thriving or Surviving?
What is your worst case scenario? What will you do if: (a) you are unable to prevent it from happening, or (b) you are unable to mitigate the outfall from its actual occurrence?
What if the worst possible thing happens during your project, in your company, in your life? What will you do if you cannot prevent the thing you thought you could prevent?
It’s true. Sometimes even the best thought-out plans and prepared-for scenarios are beyond our control.
Many organizations create risk management strategies and hope to never use them. Some even go beyond planning and simulate risks to test their risk mitigation strategies. But imagine an environmental, financial, or other disaster that is beyond your or your risk management strategy’s control. The risk blows up your project or your organization.
What happens next is the difference between surviving and thriving.
An organization that survives will patch up the outfall from the risk and continue business with a limp, hoping to get back to pre-risk operations.
An organization that thrives will look beyond the risk, reinventing itself to become a stronger, better service provider. In short, companies that thrive are lean to begin with and are able to bounce back stronger than ever
Many companies anticipate and identify challenges and opportunities in any project. That is a typical first step. However, moving beyond the first step involves change—and change is difficult. For one thing, agile companies (those that thrive) do not have an emotional attachment to the corporate status quo. They are not in love with their product or service. In fact, the less emotionally attached the corporation is to its products, processes, services, etc., the easier it is to change and become a thriving organization.
A thriving enterprise reinvents itself frequently. It not only looks forward five, 10, 15 or more years down the road, but it continuously adjusts its products, processes, and services to meet the approaching challenges and opportunities. In fact, a thriving organization learns to “fail forward” to thrive. That is, developing a perspective around change, challenges and opportunities that are relentlessly solution focused enables organizations to thrive.
Like love and respect for a family, revisiting and remembering the past is good, but not if it stalls your future. Organizations that pre-emptively make the necessary hard decisions, will not only sustain their future, but will thrive in doing so.
