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Few things offer greater return on less investment than praise—offering credit to someone in your organization who has stepped up and done the job.
Contingency planning is critical for a fire department, football team, or company and is a primary responsibility of leadership.
From start to finish, have a plan and think through every leg of the journey
He viewed it as the most important job of leadership.
Having a well-thought-out plan ready to go in advance of a change in the weather is the key to success.
Well thought out for good and bad situations...see foresight by Steven Johnson...have your team do scenario planning to prepare for the most likely, and unlikely, scenarios
At San Francisco our first twenty or twenty-five plays of the game would be scripted, along with a multitude of options, alternatives, and contingency plays depending on the situation and circumstance.
You can't predict the future, but you can prepare for it!
Scripting was a most effective leadership tool in fair and foul weather.
I kept asking and answering this question: “What do I do if . . . ?”
You must envision the future deeply and in detail—creatively—so that the unforeseeable becomes foreseeable. Then you write your script for the foreseeable.
Considering multiple scenarios, considering second and third order consequences...think it ask the way through...planning is with the time and effort to make execution effortless
under extreme stress you’re not as good. Unless, that is, you’ve planned and thought through the steps
you’re going to take in all situations—your contingency plans.
The players and coaches could sleep a little better because I had alleviated some of the deep anxiety caused by uncertainty prior to the competition;
they could anticipate what we’d do in the opening stages of the battle.
Scripting was a preprepared format, a flexible blueprint that I used to navigate through the turmoil, uncertainty, and stress of competition.
It is a guide, a cheat sheet, a reference to defer to under duress. Informs your decision making, but it's not a script in that things can and will change. Like a build your own adventure book, your job to write the adventures in advance
Of course, there’s always something you can’t anticipate, but you strive to greatly reduce the number of those unforeseeables.
Having a diverse team helps to eliminate unknown unknowns...others see past your biases
the manner in which we achieved it was almost routine because I had anticipated and prepared our team for that exact situation.
Military trains under sane circumstances until execution in all scenarios is effortless. Be prepared and run your scenarios in real time ahead of time
There was tremendous flexibility, creativity, and adaptability applied to what I had on the clipboard in front of me,
Definition of pivot!
By analyzing, planning, and rehearsing in advance you can make a rational decision, the best choice for the situation at hand.
Everything has to be strategized. You have to know where you’re going to come out before you go in. Otherwise you lose.”
I had already carefully thought through the situation and come up with an answer.
Consequently, you must not only have a plan but also prepare for what happens if the plan works or fails or if an unexpected situation suddenly requires a completely different approach.
Second order consequences!
The more thorough, the more extensive, the more rehearsed, the better you perform under the pressure of any situation that calls for an immediate decision.
What could happen tomorrow, next week, or next
year that you haven’t planned for, aren’t ready to deal with, or have put in the category of “I’ll worry about that when the time comes”?
Answer this and then think through meticulously...run it by advisors, mentors, colleagues, anyone that will listen! Get feedback, iterate, seek out those smarter than you to prepare well
Planning for the future shouldn’t be postponed until the future arrives.
The result is a very adaptable but intelligent plan for the future.
you cannot think as clearly or perform as well when engulfed by stress, anxiety, fear, tension, or turmoil. You are not at your best.
When it counts is before all hell breaks loose.
However, the rest of it—80 percent—could be under my control with comprehensive planning and preparation.
I recognized that my job as a leader was to get more out of my 80 percent than the opposing
coach and his staff could get out of their 80 percent.
Contingency planning is a major determinant of who gets closest to taking total control of their own 80 percent, the closest to maximizing their organization’s assets.
And leveraging even small advantages
scripting, adapted to your own environment in your own way, can have the same tremendous benefit for you
Planning for foul or fair weather, “scripting” as it applies to your organization, improves the odds of making a safe landing and is a key to success.
Create a crisis-management team that is smart enough to anticipate and plan for crises.
You must take steps to prepare employees to be flexible when the situation and circumstances warrant it.
an organization must be resolute in its vision of the future and the contingent plans to get where it wants to go.
Focused and flexible! That's it, Eric ries
Your version of “scripting” helps ensure that you will offer
the appropriate response in a professional manner, that you will act like a leader.
prompt yourself to continually and aggressively analyze not only your personnel but your organization’s vulnerabilities:
What’s our blind side? What are the implications of
the competition’s recent initiative? What’s our countermove to their move? Or is one even necessary?
Again...contingency planning and scripting with a crisis management team is key for mitigating failure and acting like a leader in uncertainty...see only the paranoid survive...assess your environment and adapt
semiconscious from a concussion or in agony from cracked ribs or torn ligaments—it
What are your leading and lagging indicators for success and failure?
When a threat like this occurs, we cannot allow ourselves to hope for the best or wait to see how bad the damage might be. A leader must be perceptive and respond swiftly.
Planning for the best and the worst...being decisive
all solutions are only temporary. They last until your competitor makes a meaningful countermove to your own countermove.
The key is to quickly recognize the nature of the threat and then to creatively and expeditiously respond to it.
Think chess
You can understand why I was delighted by those important statistics found in the ruins of our “bad” second season.
Post mortem analysis to determine trends, gleen insights, and track key results, lagging indicators, and outcomes/outputs become your inputs for next time...review, plan, and execute
Nevertheless, my search through the ruins showed that unless we added major weapons to the defensive secondary, we would never be contenders,
Identify weaknesses, as well as strengths, in your historical performance assessment...de-risk your weak points
The one who’s a more skilled analyst, who digs deeper and wider, will benefit more.
Start small and begin by understanding, then with a team providing input, assess the records and events against outcomes and environment. Be open minded and consider scenarios that may seem eccentric but contribute to a broader and deeper analysis
How good are you at looking through the evidence from the past—especially the recent past?
it requires a keen eye for analysis, a commonsense mind for parsing evidence that offers clues to why things went as they did—both good and bad.
