In her January 25 “Your Best Next Move” video, Bobbie LaPorte shares a real-life story from one of her clients who had to hire a team and plan at scale while the company’s budgets were still not set and a pending acquisition was holding up product integration. As he discovered, dealing with uncertainty can be scary and uncomfortable—but it can also be exhilarating. The key is seizing the opportunity to make uncertainty work for you.
Transcript of Your Best Next Move: How to Plan at Scale When Dealing with Uncertainty
Hi everyone, Bobbie LaPorte here again with my weekly leadership tips for your Best Next Move, where I help you see continuing curveballs as an opportunity. We’re done reacting to them, or pausing, waiting for a new kind of certainty to return. This year I will help you actively use your personal agency to accelerate what you want to accomplish in 2022.
This week I’d like to share a scenario that I believe illustrates this concept of making uncertainty work for you.
One of my clients leads a product organization for a technology company. Like many growth companies, there is always change, new competitors, and a learning curve for everyone. It’s still early in the year, and he was having a difficult time getting off to a good start: budgets were still not set, an acquisition was holding up product integration plan; he was actively hiring to meet the demands of the company and needed to figure out the optimal organizational structure to scale – how could he and his team possibly develop a product roadmap for the year?
Not an easy position to be in – but in these times, not unusual either.
He could have put some stop-gap measures into place, or stalled a bit, waiting for some of the dependencies to be clearer. But that could take weeks, if not months. The clock was ticking; there was a sense that everyone had eyes on him and his team. He knew he needed to act.
So how did he approach planning at scale when dealing with uncertainty?
He started with what he did know and could plan for: the products they clearly needed to improve or build; the infrastructure he already had in place; and importantly, the skills and talents he could draw on while asking people to imagine how they could contribute in different ways.
In this aspect, he wasn’t particularly directive but asked them to think about and consider what COULD be down the road for them and to plan their work around what they currently were doing plus what might be ahead.
If it sounds a bit vague, well it is. But there were limited conditions and assumptions he could count on. He was confident that his organization would be successful – he just had to give them enough structure and visibility into what was ahead so they could act – knowing this was a path they had never been down before and that many of the assumptions they were working under could – and likely – would change.
That is what the journey through uncertainty is like: scary, uncomfortable but exhilarating, and promising at the same time. The real risk I that you don’t act at all…..and miss the opportunity to turn situations like this into a generative opportunity.
So, that’s my tip. I’ll see you next week. In the meantime, use your personal agency to make uncertainty a part of your success strategy for 2022.