Beyond Bullet Proof

I think it used to be the case that businesses built bulletproof plans, or at least they thought they were bulletproof, that that was a sign of good planning. You look at all the possible outcomes and contingencies, what might happen in your market, and you plan for them so that whatever happens, you’ve got a path to success. I think that probably was a little delusional. For the most part it probably worked well, although there were sometimes some surprises that made that one silver bullet get through and caused some damage. But today, I think we all realize it’s a kind of a fool’s errand to think you can create a bulletproof plan given today’s environment with so many dynamic vectors of change.

ResilIent
So rather than make your business bulletproof, Seth Godin in a recent post talked about making it resilient, which is a great idea. That is saying, we’re gonna acknowledge that we don’t know what’s gonna happen and it’s something’s gonna happen that we didn’t plan for, and therefore we’re gonna build a capability and an organization and people that are adaptable and that can respond and can survive that crisis and actually come out of the other, of the other end, with a plan that’s moving us forward, even though it’s not exactly what we predicted. I’d like to propose an even more proactive alternative.

Antifragile
And that is rather than just be resilient, which is responding to something that happens somewhat passive to being anti-fragile, that’s a term from Nasim Taleb’s book, Anti-Fragile that talks about a capability, a characteristic of things that get stronger when they’re tested or when things change. So that’s a proactive, an assertive response to uncertainty and chaos.

Can you find a way? Can you build a plan? Can you create a team that actually gets stronger under pressure that actually has a bigger advantage when things change in a direction that nobody expected? It’s certainly business dependent, but I’ll give you one example. The factor of trust so important in B2B relationships. Could you build, can you lean into the ability to create trust for your business with your clients in any situation so that as chaos increases, they actually turn more to you. They rely more on you. Another example is showing up as human for your clients and having a purpose-built relationship. As AI grows and meaning becomes a scarcer and scarcer quantity, and more and more we see ourselves interacting with robotic answers and responses, the companies that have a human priority will be much more valuable and maybe sought out by companies that are, are starving for that authentic connection.

B2B Clarity
So I encourage you to think about your planning process. Can you change it so that you’re focused on not just rolling with the changes, but being stronger and coming out and thriving because of those changes?