Business planning in a recession with bright spot thinking

Earlier this week, I was working with leaders from a large corporate to set some strategic priorities. Talk quickly turned to how to survive the recession.

Nervous about economic uncertainty, changing customer spending habits, they started discussing the holes in their brand strategy.

Everyone would be looking for bargain options, they agreed, and their brand wasn't positioned as a frugal choice. Customers were about to leave in droves. It was time to pivot.

The conversation got detailed, fast - until one student piped up and applied some of the systems questions we'd been learning together.

"Do we know this is actually a problem?" she asked politely. "Are we seeing any changes in the data?"

Ahh. Music to my strategist ears 🎵

Our well-meaning leaders had been running on fears and assumptions about buyer behaviour, but they hadn't looked at the data to see whether cart size or total revenue was down, or whether there was evidence of brand-switching.

We're about to see a lot more of this as leadership teams prepare for an impending recession - knee-jerk, fear-based decisions driven by assumptions about what people will do and how our organisations should respond.

This kind of behaviour is a sure-fire way to dilute customer value, erode trust with your staff and lose strategic focus.

There's a better way. Before you start cutting prices, slashing jobs or shrinking budgets, take a deep breath and arm yourself with data.

Then, set about using a bright spot lens.

Look on the bright side

Bright spot thinking is encapsulated perfectly in Chip Heath's Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard:

"To pursue bright spots is to ask the question “What’s working, and how can we do more of it?” Sounds simple, doesn’t it? Yet, in the real world, this obvious question is almost never asked. Instead, the question we ask is more problem focused: “What’s broken, and how do we fix it?” 

Problem-solving can be a real downer. By focusing on all the things that are wrong, we can wind up lost, hopeless and overwhelmed. Bright spot thinking (aka positive deviance analysis) works backwards from the things that ARE working, so we can get more of them.

In 1990, Jerry Sternin, director of Save the Children in Vietnam, set out to tackle child malnutrition in rural villages, where 65% of all children under 5 weren't receiving adequate nutrients to thrive.

Traditional approaches, like supplemental feeding, weren't working. Rather than looking at all the things going WRONG, or trying to force their 'expert opinion' on the villagers, Sternin and his wife spent time with families who, despite struggling with the same environmental conditions and lack of resources, were doing OK. By staying curious, Sternin noticed that families who were doing well were going against common advice - in particular, their diet included foods not usually given to toddlers, such as brine shrimp and crab. The protein from these unconventional sources were keeping kids healthy and strong. The Sternins took that thinking and supported other families to do the same, and successfully cut childhood malnutrition by two-thirds.

How to use bright spot thinking

You can take this same approach in your work and personal life.

1. Review your data - what's going on?

Don't make assumptions. Just like our leaders in the example above, we're more prone to assumptions when we're scared. Make sure you have evidence of your situation first.

2. Find the positive outliers

Go and find what IS working. Who are your most loyal customers? Your best performing team members? When do you do your best work? In which situations are you parenting, partnering or professionalising (OK, that was a stretch for the sake of alliteration) at your best?

3. Work out what's happening differently in those cases

Studying the anatomy of these situations should reveal some interesting trends - but only if you can park your own expertise, assumptions and commitment to the status quo for long enough to see them. Ask questions and watch out for what's working.

Reflect at the end of a day when you did well, and see what the variables were. Maybe you always eat better when you exercise in the morning. Maybe you have more productive meetings on a Wednesday than a Friday. Maybe your best salespeople are calling, rather than emailing. You won't know if you don't go digging.

4. Experiment with ways to replicate that elsewhere

When something works well, you should do more of it. This should be so simple as to not need saying, but we're often so busy looking for new tools, techniques, offers, or projects, that we don't take stock of all the signs that are right in front of us.

Before you start something new, try doing more of what you're already great at, and taking those ideas and approaches into other areas of your work and life.

Quick start tips

Bright spot thinking can differentiate you and your team in a fear-driven marketplace. To get started, remember the following four tips:

1. Go and find the outliers. Is there someone out there who's doing a great job? What are they doing? What are they tapping into that others aren't?
2. Flip your questions. Instead of asking why your customers are leaving, learn more about the ones who stay. Instead of looking for more funding, think of ways to make progress with no money. 
3. Remember how great you already are. You're awesome at all sorts of stuff already. Why keep those skills in a cage? Your artistic flair, people prowess or techie nerdness could be paying off in other areas, if you give them a chance to shine. Work towards the grain.
4. Be willing to be weird. Real progress, as the late Dr Russell Ackoff says, cannot be found in continuous improvement. Creativity is a discontinuous act. 

When you feel the panic vibes starting to land in your workplace, put the brakes on. Take a deep breath, look at the data, and redirect the conversation to what IS working, so you can find ways to do more of it.

Til next week,

A

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