A Coronavirus Strategic Plan—5 Ways To Make It Happen In A Business

This blog first appeared as Steve Wunker’s piece for Forbes

By: Steve Wunker​​

With uncertainty swirling and the news growing constantly worse, it’s tempting to hunker down and await resolution of the coronavirus crisis, or to act rashly with extreme changes to costs and business model. ​

Don’t! You can rapidly create a strategic plan that gets you through coronavirus short-term and sets you up to thrive in the re-ordered competitive environment that will follow. Here are five ways to make it happen:
1.      Plan for Four Distinct Phases to the Crisis
While we do not know the duration of each phase, or all of the human and economic consequences of each, we can reliably predict that the crisis will proceed through four phases. Each one needs a plan:

• Awaiting the impact—As individuals and businesses attempt to maintain a semblance of normalcy while the coronavirus has not yet had direct effects. We can expect changed work practices, contraction of demand, and uncertainty about making big investments.
• Withstanding the impact—As health emergencies and business crises abound. Companies will struggle to operate as employees attend to sickness, supply chains break, and both B2B and B2C customers struggle to make purchases.
• Returning to normal—As people yearn for old routines, the virus passes through a critical mass of the population so that immunity develops, and eventually vaccines become available.
• Sorting out the new industry dynamics—As changed buying habits and behaviors, along with new business models and a revised competitive landscape, create both threat and opportunity.

As with the financial crisis, the fourth phase may be a long one. Plan for it now, so that your actions through the earlier phases set you up for success in that end game.

LONDON, ENGLAND - MARCH 16: A No entry sign is seen outside Copper Arena in London, England. (Photo by James Chance/Getty Images)

2.      Define the Challenges
It’s tempting to focus on firefighting in a time like this, but it’s crucial to consider the long-term challenges created. For example, if you’re at a bank reliant on your branch network to create competitive advantage, and now customers are forced to become more comfortable with virtual services, how will you compete against fintechs when the crisis ends? If you’re a restaurant prone to hemorrhaging customers now, how will you stay relevant? (Hint – think like Panera, which has just launched an $8.99/month all-you-can-drink coffee subscription, and is also pushing both online ordering and delivery services.) Be precise about the challenges to address so that your solutions can be assessed with the right lenses.

3.      Clarify the Options
If you’ve defined your challenges well, it’s usually possible to create a discrete and manageable set of options to address them. Dispassionately, write out their pros and cons. Note what further options they open up down the road, as well as which ones they might foreclose. For instance, you might seek to go direct to key customers and bypass distribution channels that could become unreliable, but what will that mean for your channel relationships down the road?

4.      Build Scenarios
We can’t assume we know how all this will end, but you can build scenarios specific to your business. Interview your key internal stakeholders and find out both their visions for the future in certain time bounds, as well as where they diverge (in a hyper-fluid situation like the one now, expect that they will). When divergences exist, mine for the underlying assumptions that drive those differences. Those assumptions can underlie your key scenarios, which may map to the four phases of the crisis laid out above.

“Guide near-term actions with a clear view of how the world will be different once we emerge out the other side.”
Stephen Wunker

5.      Meet (Virtually!) to Make Decisions
You may once have used an offsite meeting to share findings and make decisions, but now that is most likely to be happening on a platform like Zoom or Google Hangouts. That’s fine – leading tech companies use virtual meetings constantly to make big decisions in fast-moving situations. However, the meeting needs to occur differently than an in-person offsite. Try doing this:

• Split up the agenda into a series of fast-moving segments, so attention doesn’t wander and conversations stay on track.
• Ask for frequent participation through mechanisms such as voting and using the Chat Box to submit ideas and comments that all can see.
• Have sections where you call on raised hands through the online platform, to ensure that you get wide representation of views.
• Cold-call people to ensure focus and inclusion.
• Be deliberate about using long pauses to allow people a chance to take themselves off mute and chime in.
• Share a virtual whiteboard to make people feel that they are co-creating.
• Note action items at the end of each part of the agenda.
• Ensure that you have time to synthesize across agenda topics and find unforeseen linkages.
• Write up notes very quickly to make certain that people remember the big decisions in the same ways.

For many of us, coronavirus is the biggest management challenge we’ve faced since 2008, and perhaps ever. The right response reminds me of the advice I’ve given my children about what to do if they’re caught in an undertow: don’t ignore it, don’t fight it head-on, but keep your head up and find a way to swim to the side. A good strategic plan for coronavirus finds a way to look beyond the immediate circumstances, recognize a small number of plausible scenarios that will result, and guide near-term actions with a clear view of how the world will be different once we emerge out the other side.

Click for a series of working papers on managing a business through the coronavirus crisis, including a more detailed version of this piece.