Never waste a good crisis — part 4— Crises help us challenge assumptions and why that may be
What a crisis teaches us about planning & prioritisation
What can this teach us when thinking about Product development? I will walk through the concepts and takeaways that this live example of COVID-19, which touches every business and every consumer, can teach us.
Start part 1 here:
Crises help us challenge assumptions and why that may be
So how can a crisis help us challenge assumptions? A more interesting question for me to start with is ‘why do organisations allow assumptions to go unchallenged until a crisis?’.
Why do organisations allow assumptions to go unchallenged until a crisis?
I mentioned certainty and concreteness before. A bias which seems to me under-acknowledged when it comes to warping optimal prioritisation for businesses is Certainty bias — the bias that when presented with options with differing levels of uncertainty suggests people will generally opt for the more certain option — possibly aligned with the adage of ‘a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush’.
Today’s enterprise organisations are still largely captive to outdated ways of working. The approaches to budgeting and planning in many organisations in practice do not align to widely agreed on good practices. Whilst pockets of most organisations can demonstrate adoption of modern work practices, the areas of an organisation most responsible for operational practices and work environments are less likely to have adopted these. Most significantly, observing described practices for planning, project management and budgeting IT, HR and Executive Leadership are the most culpable parties — I suspect this is because these functions have been traditionally defined by the activities they are responsible for — a big risk for businesses in volatile times where the risk linked to not changing arguably now outweighs the risks associated with changes.
If a crisis illuminates what is important through the changes necessitated to overcome it then what could help us achieve the same during ordinary times? In my experience investing effort into defining the purpose for each part of the organisation quite specifically can provide some of the same sorts of sobering clarity. We often operate with implicit assumptions about the purpose of things which when unexamined lead to faulty assumptions. Just the act of making these explicit and having conversations about them across groups can make clear investments which otherwise may have seemed nice to have or important, not urgent.
A more interesting question for me to start with is ‘why do organisations allow assumptions to go unchallenged until a crisis?’
This brings us to another lesson: Being explicit and clear in the purpose of all parts of our organisation and how they add up to address the organisations purpose is important to optimal performance.
