Question:  3 frogs are sitting on a fence, when one decides to jump off.
How many frogs are left sitting on the fence?
A) 1
B) 2
C) 3
The answer is of course C) 3    Because it only decided to jump off. No action!

OK, so there are many pieces of advice floating around on social platforms about “tips” and “steps” to assist business owners on how to navigate through the economic shock of Covid-19. I must say it is pleasing and reassuring to see so many genuine offers to help and assist where ever possible. With all this info, however, there is an issue, where do you start?  It can be overwhelming at times to even know where to begin.

And this is where it starts to get counter-productive. Too much info can cause paralysis. Right now this is a real potential threat to recovery efforts. A reason for this is that we have moved from a relatively stable environment to one of rapid change. Businesses have been going through change in recent times with reasonable pace and purpose, but what has happened lately is the things we deemed fairly stable have all of a sudden become uncertain. Coupled with this, the volume of information speeding towards us has exploded. In many cases information is becoming outdated the same day it was initially received. This volatile environment is not conducive to making decisions and implementing change. But, what is accepted is there still needs to be changes. 

This can be somewhat perplexing and runs a very real risk of causing a “halt” to decision making. This is something we want to avoid at all cost. Standing still will most certainly threaten the viability of the business before long. So, what must we do?

Well, the trick is simple. We need to act!! 

When information is overwhelming the business, or systems and processes within the business, we need to adopt a more “fluid” approach to what we are doing. First we need to make sure we have in place a good way to observe what is going on, both in the business and to the business. It is most likely our monitoring systems are not up scratch for this so some attention here is required. We need to make sure we are able to easily gather the most relevant information available. At the moment, this information is likely to be “what is most likely to cause us the most pain or damage?” Facts are vital here!

We then need to make a decision about what we have observed. What can we do to mitigate the damage or pain? Who do we need to enable us to do these things? And, make sure we can communicate the decision to the team effectively.

At this point, most will fail to do the most crucial part. Act! Once a decision is made, you must act on it. Many businesses miss this part. They identify what needs to be done, then they don’t do it.

Once you have acted, you repeat the process. Observe, decide, act. It gets easier as you go due to the repeated observations becoming more of a confirmation that the actions you are taking are actually working.