Balancing Your Business Plans with an Ever-changing Reality

When running a successful business, success is found in having a solid business plan and sticking to it. Unfortunately, at times reality steps in and your plans, SOPs, earning projections and established scripts which you thought were written in stone are now dust.





It’s perfectly OK

We have a strategy for rolling with these changes as long as you understand that disruption is part of reality and is something that needs to be embraced.
The typical causes of outside disruption for businesses usually fall under these 3 categories.
  • Customer Needs (Demand evolves and you can become irrelevant)
  • Competition (Other companies offer what you offer at a competitive rate)
  • Market Changes (Markets are volatile and can cause major disruptions due to political, social, or even environmental fluctuations)
Fighting these disruptions require you to constantly improve, innovate and adapt. There are two types of performance styles at play in this arena. Tactical and Adaptive performance.

Tactical performance, or how well can you navigate changes and stick to your strategy or business plan. Many opt for this strategy because it’s easier to ‘stick to the plan’.

Adaptive performance; characterized by how well you can diverge from your plan and create an environment where your strategy can grow from new ideas.



In a tactical performance plan, Goals or benchmarks and growth plans exist which need or demand a strict adherence to your established plan or strategy. This is how things have always gotten done and it’s not a bad thing. However danger exists in this rigidness can stifle creativity, and in an adaptive environment, stop growth.
If you were to build a balanced business culture which leverages tactical performance with adaptive performance, you will find a much more effective way to build a stable enterprise with long-lasting potential.

How?

Traditionally, businesses offer bonuses or promotions or even dismissals based on reaching goals or incentives. Employees will work hard to meet those incentives, but they tend to be less innovative and creative because of the ramifications of missing those benchmarks.

The solution is to avoid linking to this performance metric and set goals a different way.

If instead of performance metrics you setup a data acquisition, analysis and learning goals, then you can turn your manuals and SOPs into helpful guides to allow employees to embrace an ownership role and create new solutions. You can hold brainstorming sessions to build teamwork and give acknowledgement to those who give solutions and improve the business.



Now you are embracing innovation. Your tactical performance plan remains as the backbone to your business, but coupled with an adaptive performance goals and structure, you can unlock the keys to happier customers, happier employees and a bigger profit.

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