APRIL 2020 / NO. 2
TAGS: CORONA, VIRUS, CRISIS, AFTER ACTION REVIEW, MANAGEMENT, GOVERNANCE, DWIGHT EISENHOWER

The worst course of ACTION is? DOING NOTHING!

In our businesses we need to focus on short-term business health priorities such as revenues and cashflow, but at the same time we should address the longer-term realities and opportunities.
As business leader you are not alone. What is needed is collective thinking of the board, of the management team, of the intelligence team and to use creativity, knowledge and experience of all those around you.
We are convinced this is the way to win both the battle and the war during this global corona crisis. What is needed is courage and above all courage to prioritize. Those who defend everything in effect defend nothing. If every thing is a priority, then nothing becomes a priority. At the time of crisis, it’s not always easy to know if being brave and being right are the same thing. The line between bravery and foolishness can be thin and it’s often only with hindsight that we know which Courses of Action were, in the end, the correct ones. To judge hindsight we can use After Action Reviews (AARs).

Three stages to Act

Business leaders will need to act across three stages in this corona crisis:
1. Resolve and Resilience: support employees, customers and suppliers. Empathize and understand customers.Strengthen your cashflow. Adjust to where the customer is now. Prioritize the most relevant product portfolio and finally go all-in on agile.
2. Plan for the Recovery: too much focus on near-term business means a pure survival strategy, however this is winning the battle but losing the war. Both rethink your company strategies and redefine customer loyalty.
3. Reimagination toward the ‘next normal’: get the in-depth insights and foresight and imagine how new attitudes, habits and behaviors might change.
It might be possible that entirely new businesses and business models will emerge from this corona crisis. Strategic decision making gets a third dimension. In addition to urgency, to relevance this third dimension is priority, classified as high, medium and low. General Dwight Eisenhower used these three dimensions in crucial decision making during WWII.
After Action Reviews-AARs
Always used in our strategic intelligence best practices, AARs are an essential tool to evaluate our key decisions. AARs give us answers on both successes and failures: What was suppose to happen(1), What actually happened(2), What are the differences and Why(3), and What can we learn from it. AARs are highly applicable in business and mangement today. AARs were implemented by the Pentagon during the last years of the Vietnam War in the 1960-1970s.

We are full in business

Just to let you know that we are still full in business. Established in 1985, we operate since 2008 within our vitual global connected network of over 450 researcher, analysts, journalists and other experts. This connected network is common practice since 2008. We also have completed an extensive new state-of-art whitepaper: “Strategic intelligence prevents organizations getting into a Strategic Crisis”. It’s in the Dutch language and the English language publication will be available this summer. In addition, we are running an extensive test in predictive intelligence with 85% correctness on future trends & foresight. Finally, we have postponed our two day International Master Class Strategy & Strategic Intelligence toward October 2020.
“You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time”.
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