Uncertainty presents an opportunity to reconsider how you do things and whether there are ways you can improve efficiency and spread risk.

This will allow you to plan for a variety of scenarios and outcomes building in enough flexibility to make the business agile and ready to respond to changes. Understand economic changes, what the competition is doing and how/whether your customer needs have changed.

Once you know where the business is now, it’s essential to gather as much information as you can from the outside world. Knowing your starting point is the first step in planning your journey. Live data is critical, ensuring you are on top of key performance indicators and financials. These are challenging times, but the focus doesn’t need to be on what is not happening, accept where the business is now and think about what is happening now. The most successful business leaders are those who know when to take a risk and when to keep their powder dry but for less established executives, the fear of getting it wrong can be paralysing. Uncertainty is nothing new, in fact in any and all businesses, it has a significant part to play. With many companies still having staff on furlough and no clear timeline on when the economy is going to start to creep towards recovery, nothing is certain but uncertainty itself.

As we begin to emerge from the COVID-19 pandemic, what’s increasingly clear is that we are not returning to business-as-usual. There is nothing more unsettling for most people than not knowing what is going to happen next.

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