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Hey there - it's Brian 👋

“How do you build a strategy when the world is so chaotic?”

COVID? Recession? Russia/Ukraine? AI?

We use a tool just to create your strategy when you have no idea how the world will turn out.

Today, I’ll explain how we actually built strategy for one of the big social platforms.

They wanted a strategy that connects people, but didn’t know how their strategy would change after the George Floyd riots and the Black Lives Matter protests.

This issue is for you if you’d like to make a strategy, but your industry is changing too fast.

Let’s make your business an outlier: 👇

Meet the tool that helps you create strategy when the world is too chaotic to predict

Imagine you’re trying to create a 3 - 5 year vision for your business.

But the world is too chaotic:
• Recession or no recession?
• Outcomes of Russia/Ukraine war?
• How does AI transform businesses?

How can you make a vision when change is happening weekly?

Everything is moving so fast. But strategy in chaos is possible.

Here’s are 4 real client strategies I built:
• How should banks evolve post-COVID?
• How should businesses react to Russia / Ukraine war?
• How should a tech company position itself in changing AI landscape?
• How should a social platform build a vision when the US is so divided?

Hard questions right?

You need to use a different strategy tool when everything is so chaotic, it’s called:

Scenario Planning.

Here’s an overview:

To pick one example, I’ll tell you about how we built the strategy for the social platform (that wanted to keep the world connected when it’s getting divided):

How do you create a vision when the world is so politically divided?

At the time, there were riots around the Black Lives Matter. Free speech. Trump.

The world was dividing and pushing further away into their own sides. This social platform needed to get people to come together.

So the company asked to come up with 4 possible outcomes to the chaos, and to build a different strategy for each outcome.

This client had a scenario planning team in-house so they wanted us just to focus on creating the outcomes (“scenarios”).

So here’s what we did:

🧔🏻‍♂️ Brian’s nerdy side rant:
I’ve never seen a full scenario planning team in-house outside of this client.

Scenario planning is important, but so rare that it’s always outsourced to consultants (so you don’t have to hire a team in-house).

1. Find the forces that create your scenarios

The hardest part was figuring out what forces create the scenario.

A "force" is anything big picture that impacts your problem.

It could be either:
1. Politics
2. Economics
3. Society changes
4. Tech changes

We call it the PEST framework.

Anyway, in this case, the social platform was trying to get people to talk to each other (even if they were on opposite sides of politics).

So we wanted to come up with a list of 160 things that could affect how people would talk to each other online.

I’ll show you a few examples:

🧑‍⚖️ Politics:
1) Government creates laws against free speech
vs
2) Government stops censorship

💰 Economics:
1) Work moves online through social platforms
vs
2) Work stays off social platforms

🌎 Society:
1) Society becomes so divided there’s a civil war
vs
2) Society sees the damage in fighting each other and comes together.

🧑🏻‍💻 Tech:
1) AI creates content that perfectly mimics human experience
vs
2) AI can’t create the same content that humans can

Did you see how each “force” is actually a range (one extreme vs another)?

You have no idea what will happen so you pick the extreme ends so you can see the world unfold within the range.

Then, we prioritized the list down to the TWO that have the biggest impact on your business and you’re least certain about.

Why uncertain?

Well, the things that are more certain you make a regular strategy and don’t need this tool.

Only use scenario planning for when the world is chaotic.

🧔🏻‍♂️ Brian’s nerdy side rant:
The actual framework we used was unnecessarily complicated. We used PESTLE + M (+Legal, Environmental, and Military).

When you add too many categories the lines get blurry and it’s hard to analyze.

There were so many times I kept asking “does this fall into “legal” or “political”?

Keep it simple. Use PEST.

Side rant #2: 130 forces feels like a lot, but they’re quick to make. You could ChatGPT most of them.

Last thing you want is to get hit by a big force you didn’t expect.

2. Combine forces to create scenarios

Then, we combine the two biggest forces to create scenarios.

See how each end of the range is on either side of the 2 × 2 below? (one force on left vs right. The other force on top vs bottom.)

Then the ranges created 4 possible futures in the boxes! See the 4 scenarios below?

Based on how society moves in each range, is which scenario we end up in.

So here’s the questions we answered for the client in each scenario:
• What’s the story for each scenario?
• What has to happen to be in a certain scenario?
• How does each scenario affect you? Your customers? Competitors? Suppliers?
• What causes these impacts?

🧔🏻‍♂️ Brian’s nerdy side rant:
I can’t share the actual scenarios we used but these should get you close enough to understand what we did.

3. Create a strategy for each scenario

On this project we handed the scenarios to the client for their team to build the strategies for each future.

We presented the scenarios and had a workshop with their executive team where we helped them think through how they should change their business if different scenarios happen.

To give you an example of what it could look like:

If you see the world heading towards the “Metaverse” scenario:
build the business to focus on community building and 3D experiences.

If you see the world heading towards the “2D buy and leave” scenario:
build the business to focus on effortless customer experiences.

🧔🏻‍♂️ Brian’s nerdy side rant:
Now, one sentence that tells you where to focus is far too simple for a strategy but creating a strategy is a topic for a different issue.

If you want help with your strategy check the link in the “P.S.” section below.

And that’s it!

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See you next Thursday 👋

Brian
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🛠️ Outlier Links

This was the book I read to get ready for my scenario planning project with the social platform. It’s an overview of the process. Definitely recommend.

Don’t want a full book? Here’s a short PDF overview from Deloitte. Check out pages 16 + 17 for the detailed steps to scenario plan.

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