By

Ankit Mishra

Managing Director, Bodhi Tree Ventures

Bodhi Tree Ventures have been a member of My Business since November 2020

But in moments of existential crisis, the key questions most of us are grappling with are how do we defend our business in order to win in the future.

To answer these questions, we need to look at organisations that are equipped to deal with an existential crisis. The first one that comes to my mind is the Army. Their bread and butter revolve around preparing units to survive during an enemy attack. So, what we can learn from them?

Professor Gregory D. Bunch, Adjunct Professor of Entrepreneurship at Chicago Booth School of Business, along with Tom Gaines, US Army Major, shared their views on this in the article ‘How to lead organizations through the COVID-19 crisis’. Below is an excerpt coupled with what I have seen in my working life.

Military thinkers describe the battlefield as a V.U.C.A. scenario – volatile, uncertain, complex, and unambiguous. We can easily say that COVID-19 has created a V.U.C.A. scenario for us in the business world.

To deal with this scenario, a business leader should follow the following three steps:

We know if employees feel emotionally and physically safe then it improves their productivity. It becomes more important in a crisis situation. To do it effectively in a crisis, Professor Bunch and Major Gaines suggest asking a series of questions. For example: 

1. What does emotional and financial safety look like for me and my staff?
2. How can I support, or get support, to ensure my and employees’ mental well-being?
3. How can I support, or get support, to ensure the financial well-being of the employees, myself, and the company in general?

These questions may sound obvious but, in my experience, I have found that even the most experienced leaders succumb to pressure in these situations. I noticed that the key difference between how a successful leader acted in these situations was by breaking the problem into bite-sized chunks, defining a process together with their teams and continuously measuring it to improve.

Once people are secured, as a leader, our next job is to prioritise tasks and resources. The first priority, here, should be identifying all the time-sensitive work that must happen to ensure the safety of the people and the continuity of your organisation.

The second priority is to get back to the routine tasks. V.U.C.A. thinking suggests that, as soon as possible, leaders should get people to go back to standardised work. This will help settle their minds and make them productive. Some of the questions leaders can ask in this situation are:

1. Who can I assign to ensure the mental and financial safety of our employees?
2. Who can I assign to focus on business continuity and survival?
3. Who is already thinking about the future growth of the business and needs permission to do so?
4. What directions, training, resources do they need from me?

This is where we, business leaders, put on our strategic thinking hats and make some critical decisions. I have categorised some key questions to ask ourselves into three stages:

Stage 1: survive

1. Where do we need to conserve and hunker down because the situation is still too dynamic?
2. Who or what can take our customers and market share from us now? How do we defend our market share?
3. What we need to change to retain our customers?

Stage 2: adapt to grow

1. How can we change or evolve?
2. What can we do gain new or different customers?
3. Whom can we serve to sell to?
4. Has anything in the present changed that now makes us uniquely valuable?

Stage 3: thrive

1. What can we do now to prepare ourselves to accelerate and succeed when the crisis is over?

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of My Business. 

Ankit Mishra

Managing Director, Bodhi Tree Ventures

Ankit is Managing Director at Bodhi Tree Ventures, a private investment firm that aims to acquire & operate small businesses. He specialises in family-business, post-acquisition integration, business transformation and leading through change.