How to Make Your Company Ready For a Crisis?
Thinking ahead always played a key role in the success of your business. But how to think about the future when everyone is focused on surviving?
(co-authored with Carl Manuel Funk).
Timing is everything — a little backstory
The Future Modeling Framework is one key element to strategize the vision of your company in the long run. It’s a lengthy (but worthy) process and companies all over the world spend days with us in one room or in a remote digital session to get through a complex, but equally fun, process.
At least until March 2020.
We are, like 90% of the world population, at a turning point with our company and the services we provide.
It’s not only because the whole world changed in two weeks and it’s not only because half of the world is in quarantine.
It’s because nobody is capable of strategizing when resources, employees, and liquidity are on the verge for almost…everyone.
So, we needed something else.
Our main goals were the development of a pragmatic framework that suits the changing business needs immediately and a method that can help you navigate through the times of anxiety and self-doubts.
Our proven and standardized Future Modeling Framework served as a tested and reviewed blueprint to bring progressive future foresighting to everyone who needs it.
We detected 6 relevant features, which are equally essential to business owners, team leads and freelancers all over the world.
1. Short-Term Orientation of 12–18 months
2. Lean Structure and Rich in Content
3. Cost-Effectiveness
4. Open Access Availability
5. Easy to Attend Alone, in Teams or With Our Virtual Support
6. Based on Future Modeling and Our Research
We firmly stand by our vision of future modeling as a key development tool for your company’s strategy, but with the current limitations, companies need simplified solutions to keep their heads up.
Why Corona Modeling?
The last two months distorted industries all over the world. The next 2 years will transform them.
Corona Modeling is the strategic guideline to support and prepare businesses for the ongoing crisis and beyond.
It’s a compass to reframe the first impressions of a new world we have to face. At least during the next 12–18 months, we believe.
Since the Future Modeling Framework is a systemic approach to explore new market opportunities and industry transformations during the next 10 years, we wanted to create a framework where we exactly do the opposite.
We stay in the present and envision the current impact of a pandemic on your company.
Let’s walk you through the framework real quick.
The Status Quo = Corona Quo
To define a status quo right now might be one of the most difficult tasks for politicians and managers alike. To ease the task, think about the challenges you faced during the very last weeks. Question the immediate results of your quarantine, the remote work, and team collaboration.
1. Business Disruption
Define Corona-related issues for your industry in general and concrete services or products. In which fields do you expect longterm revenue potentials or cuts? Which measures are needed to survive financially?
2. Social Distancing
How is your organization prepared for 12–18 months of remote work and social distancing? How will you lead, interact and sell with limited human interactions to employees and customers?
3. Uncertainty
The current situation is unprecedented and we have no blueprint of what will happen next. How stays your organization adaptive to any unforeseeable events during the next months?
4. Corona Readiness
Think about the Readiness Level of your organization to deal with the virus. Rate from 1 (badly prepared) to 10 (champion).
Desirable Futures
The next block contains 4 steps. Until now you spent some time with the current implications and in general, how your company reacts to times of crisis. Now you need to show how your company will act. All your desires and your preferred outcome should diminish your anxieties.
Let’s start the positive exploration mode and brainstorm like no one’s watching.
5. Positive Impacts
Every crisis is full of opportunities and chances for new business models. Think about the positive impacts of the current situation on your industry and reframe any negative assumptions.
6. Desirable Futures
Imagine as a team desirable futures and scenarios beyond the virus. Define bold hypothesis starting with „What if …“ and combine the strongest ones to systemic scenarios.
7. Superpowers
Reflect your findings and collect the most important principles and capabilities that will support players of your scenario (including your organization) to handle the current crisis best.
8. Corona Compass
Based on the scenarios and principles shape a bold vision for your organization beyond the virus. The Compass will provide vital orientation in times of radical change, complexity, and uncertainty.
Action
A framework is a framework is a framework. All the tools united aren’t worth a penny if you can’t apply them to the real world. The crucial part is often forgotten but is the one last important step: it’s called doing.
9. Applied Futures
Travel back to now. Make instant decisions on what needs to be done based on these newly gained insights, the defined principles and your Corona Compass. Focus on action points with clear short term results and concrete definition of responsibilities and resources.
Don’t Bet On Coincidences
It’s easy to feel overwhelmed with remote work and keeping all team members aligned in the middle of a pandemic via glitching videoconference tools and noisy pets.
We know it. We face it, too.
Nevertheless, as a founder or CEO, there’s always that something. But what happens if the vision of your company, either a startup or a large Fortune 500 company, needs to change quickly because of a virus? And what happens if they don’t? Are you ready to adapt?
The Corona Modeling Framework is an approach to find a strategy in crisis. Not just react and run after new regulations, policies and disappearing business models, but to come up with bold ideas of survival and, yes, change.
If you prepare yourself now, you’re ahead of the game later. There will always be a chance of a crisis or conflict. Try your best to navigate through.
Normality, is it you?
How do you innovate the services and products of your company during times like these? How do you keep and maintain disruptive envisioning?
The truth is, innovation always disrupted industries.
Whatsapp, Slack, UBER, Instagram or Venmo were founded during the financial crisis between 2008 and 2010. Airbnb founded 2008, just saw a massive crash in sales and liquidity- even former innovators can be disrupted.
“Nothing is too big to fail” also means: “nothing is too small to succeed”. Maybe the smallest intervention in your business could mean an overwhelming transformational change.
