Never Say This

"I didn't think that THIS could happen", has often been uttered in the aftermath of some unlikely or even likely event by people who failed to think through what could be before some major decision or event.

It's not often for a lack of planning or strategizing, either. You lay out the idea, you map the things that have to take place, you work to get things in order, and then suddenly things go sideways. Your new hire suddenly quits or goes off the rails...didn't see that coming? Your project fell apart because the funding didn't get approved because of a last-minute expense from an unrelated but critical business unit that needed the funds more. How was I supposed to plan for that you might think?

The reality is you should never be caught off guard, or at least if you are surprised, it shouldn't throw you off your game, because, somewhere, somehow, you should have planned for the unplanned, unexpected event.

One of my favorite sayings comes from Donald Rumsfeld, politics aside, Don had a way with words and this gift is one we should always remember. I'll paraphrase here but the gist goes like this..."There are all the things we know, these are our known, knowns. There are all the things we know, that we don't know, these are our known, and unknowns, and last we have the things we don't know, we don't know. These are our unknown, unknowns, and it's often this group that can cause us the greatest troubles.

There are two tools that everyone can easily add to defend against unknown, unknowns. The first is simply to make sure you map out the first two cases, known-knowns and known-unknowns. This ensures that at least you can control for information gaps. Once known unknowns are identified they can be labeled so you can figure out if they can be known and at what expense and that can factored into a decision analysis. What is the total addressable market for our product? What will the demand be at price point x vs price point y? How likely are we to recover the costs of this capital expenditure given the current business cycle? What are the chances the a massive weather event will hit this region in the next 5 years?

I like the term premortem, used by Gary Klein which describes the process of imagining all the ways that something can go wrong. Sometimes, the wilder idea, the better. Because it's the low probability high-impact event that we fail to see often because we didn't understand the probabilities and/or we failed to imagine the scenario in the first place. That's part of what this exercise is designed to guard against. Do not be like the inductivist who thinks that all the patterns of observation about the past will be a good way to predict the future.

Secondly, to make sure you do the premortem, make doing it a part of your checklist. The humble checklist is one of the most powerful tools to avoid disaster, especially, when making decisions or preparing for events is routine. We've been doing this for so long why would we need a checklist, is exactly why you need a checklist. It's how a surgeon forgets to wash hands, how operations take place on the wrong leg, how a production line runs with the wrong specs and ruins an expensive supply of critical raw material.

We've been planning for sales calls our careers, we don't need a checklist! And then suddenly you are in a meeting and your PC dies or your SME gets stuck in traffic and can't make the call to run the demo? If you had a checklist with a step that includes, shit that can go wrong and we do, then you would have a plan b, you call the audible and you run the meeting. If you don't, it probably gets awkward, real fast and you watch your deal die a slow death.

How many people have been laid off or lost jobs because the leaders of the company went on a hiring spree because they were certain it was the time to scale up and reach 10x growth only to turn around 6 months later and realize their hypothesis was wrong? Bad stuff happens, but it doesn't need to, and it certainly doesn't need to come as a surprise. The team that can experience a setback and say, well, we knew this was a possibility, so let's get back to work is going to be much more resilient than the one that doesn't have this kind of outlook.

Be it at an individual level, a team level, or a company level, the resilient ones are the ones that can absorb the shock, not because they like it, but because they have prepared to face unexpected, unfavorable events. I should add that this kind of planning or failure to plan isn't just for when bad stuff happens. It can crush people in just the opposite way. A sudden windfall of money shows up, if you haven't planned for it, you might end up blowing it all and more! Sudden success has been the ruin of both people and companies, you need to imagine what winning big might be like and have a plan to handle it.

Ultimately, the world spins, stuff happens, and lots of it we didn't see coming, and we never will, but you can be prepared for any of it, by slowing down, thinking, and checking your boxes every time.