Blog

WARNING – If you are a vegetarian, vegan or an animal lover you may be offended by the story in this blog post.

When you're presented with numbers you don't know if they are buckshot or accurate. You often assume the later when it is often the former.

You must often witness people plucking out of thin air, numbers such as budget estimates, estimates of probability and estimates of impact. It is very common because it takes time to get accurate. We often prefer the buckshot approach because we hit

One of my readers reached out to me after I introduced the strategy funnel last week which made me decide to prepare an example of how the approach works for a prolonged crisis, like COVID-19. One of my sons co-manages the bars in a three-level restaurant offering a variety of dining experiences. It is located in Manly here in Sydney, which is a tourist area. I have been thinking a lot about the restaurants and hence his future. So I thought I would use the restaurant’s owners as an example.

A la

I’ve taken a sales and marketing tool and turned it into a strategy tool that you might find very helpful right now. The concept works like this:

There are a range of possible futures playing out for each of us. None we can be certain about. The further out in time we look the more uncertain the view. Nothing new here. What is our response? Generally, scenario planning and forecasting. The questions you should be asking yourself now is how many scenarios should I be considering and how can I move

Laid out in front of you are a range of scenarios as to how the coming months might play out. You have already been shocked and surprised since our world got turned on its head. How many more surprises are coming your way? What might you do about them?

The answer is assumption busting. Identifying and clearly articulating the assumptions underlying each scenario and asking how you can test those assumptions to reduce uncertainty. Let me give you an example of how assumption busting works in pract