Charting a Path Forward Without A Map
THE CORONAVIRUS PANDEMIC has generated tremendous uncertainty for businesses everywhere. But while the scale of the crisis is new, uncertainty itself is not — it’s a natural condition of doing business, and numerous tools exist to quantify and mitigate it. Most strategies rely on accumulated knowledge from the past, whereby there’s a precedent on which to make sense of unknowns. COVID-19 smashes all of that. There is no precedent for how to respond to this moment, much less steer ahead.
The biggest challenge to businesses right now isn’t uncertainty, but ambiguity — a condition in which the future is unclear, the past is no help, and we don’t even know what we don’t know. There is no predicting when the pandemic will end, nor what ‘business as usual’ will look like when it does.
Early in the pandemic, Stewart Butterfield, the CEO of Slack Technologies, tweeted about the unparalleled challenge leaders face trying to buoy their organizations in the absence of any familiar strategies:
Though Slack — a collaboration hub that brings people, information, and tools together to get work done
