Failure is most certainly an option. If it isn’t, you are not living in the real world and your business has no chance at all for survival. Coaches love to pump up their players by telling them that failure is not an option and that the only way forward is victory. These can be highly motivating ideas. But those athletes still lose. The winner of the Super Bowl was not the team with the best motivational speech. It was the team that did the best failure planning because they were very much aware of all the ways their game plan might fail.
Just as the road to hell is paved with good intentions, the road to success is paved with failure planning. This is not an excuse for hopeless despair in the face of a crisis. This is the grownup consideration that your plans might now work out as you hoped. It is contingency planning if you prefer to think of it in a more positive light. But boundless positivity is not anymore useful than paralyzing negativity. What you should be aiming for is reality. You have to be honest with yourself about the challenges you face. Sometimes, it is a no-win situation and you just have to make the best of it and pick up the pieces. In some situations, mere survival is all the success you can hope for. Here are a few of those situations, and what you can do if you find yourself in one of them:
A Debilitating Accident
No one grabs the keys to the car thinking that their trip is going to be cut short by a debilitating accident and that the best thing that will happen to them that day is that they have a close encounter with the Jaws of Life. But every day, someone wins that gruesome lottery. And everyone on the road is automatically entered whether or not they want to be.
The second-best thing you can hope for is that you procured excellent disability insurance so that your time off work will be covered. Even if you have emergency savings, you don’t want to drain that account if you don’t have to. You will likely find that your emergency savings aren’t enough to cover the entire time you are out of work. You also have to consider the possibility that you will not be able to return to your previous line of work. That means you will need extra time to retool for something else. Disability insurance is like an emergency savings account that will be there when you need it.
Actions of a Rogue Employee
No one in the Blizzard game company expected their business to be destabilized due to a sexual harassment and discrimination scandal. Blizzard President J. Allen Brack is the latest to have an unceremonious exit from the company. He very likely didn’t see any of this coming. At this point, the facts of the case are academic. Every company is subject to the actions of a single employee. What every company needs is a plan for appropriately dealing with the initial complaint, dealing with the media, and dealing with law enforcement. What happens, in reality, is that companies have no plan and are blindsided when something comes up. They go into reaction mode and do their best to bumble through it. That is the shortest path to failure. If you have no plan for what happens when some element of your company engages in bad behavior, you should get to work on it right now before the leaks hit the fan.
A Move to Remote Work
Most businesses had been fighting the idea of working from home before the pandemic. So when it came, those businesses were forced to retool and face a new reality, or die. Many died. What happens if the worst happens again? Are you ready to continue with your business activities if no one can come to the office? There is good reason to believe it will happen again. Have a plan in place for when it does.
No one wants to think about the possibility of a debilitating accident, the actions of a rogue employee, or a sudden change in their operational model. By planning for these events, you stand an excellent chance of surviving them.
