This week’s newsletter is focused on leadership and in particular, decision making in uncertain times.
At the end of April, EgonZhender published the results of their 2020 CSCO survey of 235 large companies. I covered this in my May 3 newsletter. The top internal issues that CSCOs said they faced was the growing complexity of supply chains. Talent shortages and organizational culture were number 2 and 3. The survey was performed in the fourth quarter of 2019, prior to Covid-19. However, I believe it’s a safe bet to say growing complexity in supply chain is still the number one internal issue for CSCOs.
Given the last nine months and where we are with the pandemic response, this may be a good time to pause for some self-reflection. How did you and your team approach the difficult decisions in the complex and fluid environmnet of Covid-19, particularly the early stages when their were so many unkowns? We now have the benefit of some history to reflect on this. You likely have some excellent lessons learned from this experience already. Still, there alway is the possibility to improve your team’s decision making capability.
To this end, you may have heard of “sensemaking” and even had some training in it. The term has been around since 1979, but it seems to be coming back into vogue in strategy circles, particulary with the vast complexities that supply chains face today. The MIT/Sloan Review just featured sensemaking in their Fall Special Collection Reboot Your Strategy collection.
Here’s one definition for sensemaking: “Sensemaking is the ability or attempt to make sense of an ambiguous situation. More exactly, sensemaking is the process of creating situational awareness and understanding in situations of high complexity or uncertainty in order to make decisions” (Klein) One excellent sensemaking tool is the Cynefin (ku-nev-in) Framework. Watch this quick (8 min) video summary here to get a good idea of the framework. Going just going through the Covid-19 period decisions using the Cynifin Framework can be a great way to conduct a leadership post mortem.
Try the following mental exercise after watching the video. Walk through your team’s key decisions at various stages of the Covid-19 knowns and unknowns, e.g. Dec 2019 pre-pandemic plans, Mar 2020, July and now as we go into the holiday, flu, and election season, you next moves big decisions. Here are few questions you may ask the team.
- How long were you in the Disorder space (i.e.,indecision on how to approach the problems)? For example, which parts of your plans do you drop and what resources to reallocate, etc?
- How did you approach the decision-making process as unknowns became knowns, for example, in the Cynefin Framework, going from Chaos to Complexity modes? Did you fall back into command and control mode. What roles and responsibilities changed in your team?
- Did you move any sub-task decisions from Simple to Complicated (requiring bringing in specialized expertise)? For example machine learning algorithms were not based on the massive demand-supply changes some industries were experiencing.
You can look at the upcoming US presidential election, holiday, and flu season and have the team map out sets of decisions and strategies to handle the uncertainties on online vs in store, potential regulatory, tariffs, social unrest, etc. The uncertainty is daunting.
Looking back, there is a wide range in approaches on how leaders in countries, states, and municipalities handled Covid-19 decisions. Clearly, some remain the command and control decision mode (appropriate for Chaos). Some moved more quickly to the Complexity mode. Few went as quickly as Sweden to the complexity and sensing modes.
The outcomes of how decisions are addressed can be devastating when factors are not considered. For example, in the developing countries in Africa, with broken supply chains and living day-to-day for food supply, lockdowns have been devastating in some countries. Decisions did not take into account the emerging certainty in the data that young and very young people,i.e. under 20 rarely die from Covid-19, under 5 it is near zero. Africa has a very young population. The lockdowns are causing an additional
- 10,000 children per month are dying from malnutrition.
- 550,00 children per month are having severe malnutrition
- 3 million new cases of tuberculosis with 1.3 million deaths in 2020 due to breakdowns in supply chains in these nations.
The early decisions in New York and New Jersey, to place Covid-19 positive patients in nursing homes, created a death rate for the entire state that is 2-3 times higher per capita than Sweden and states that protected the elderly. Looking at the early age-related death toll data could have altered decisions.
You might find it useful to applied the following chart from the 2007 Harvard Business Review Article, A Leader’s Framework for Decision Making
I would love to to hear what your postmortems reveal. I would be happy to set up a sharing webinar to learn from this. If you are interested you may contact me at my email address don@sc-exec.com.
For past newsletters, go to https://sc-exec.com/newsletters/
Best regards,
Don
Don K Brown