422. Reframing Uncertainty as Opportunity with Rebecca Homkes

unSILOed with Greg LaBlanc

Business leaders face uncertainty everyday, it’s unavoidable. But one of the most important things leaders can do to help their companies thrive is to confront uncertainty and reframe it as an opportunity for growth.

Rebecca Homkes is a lecturer at London Business School’s Department of Strategy and Entrepreneurship, a faculty member at Duke Corporate Executive Education, and the author of the book, Survive, Reset, Thrive: Leading Breakthrough Growth Strategy in Volatile Times.

Rebecca and Greg discuss her three steps for growth strategy and how the pandemic shaped these ideas, the significance of utilizing uncertainty as an advantage, and why agility must be aligned with strategy if you want to avoid chaos.

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

Episode Quotes:

Agility without strategy is chaos

44:45: What I hear often, and I'm sure you've heard something similar is, strategy is great. But we're not going to do strategy this year because we want to be more agile. And you have to pause, smile, and say, the definition of agility is making good decisions quickly aligned with strategy. Lacking a strategy, you cannot have agility. You have speed, but it's not aligned speed. And that's the key words you're looking for: aligned speed. Alignment without speed is too slow to matter. Speed without alignment is chaotic. You're building aligned speed, which comes from the true definition of agility: making good decisions quickly aligned with strategy. But you can't do that lacking a value-creating strategy, because then I don't know what's most important and why. And I might be making great decisions, and you're making decisions, but if they're not aligned with each other, we're not rowing in the same direction as an organization.

Directions give teams alignment

25:04: Directions are okay. And the direction gives the team the alignment they need from leadership while preventing you from falling into that delusion trap that you've got. Because as soon as you've communicated a firm message, you will also be less likely to be heads up looking for any information that might go against it.

What's the advantage of really surfacing uncertainty as one of the key things that leaders need to focus on?

02:30: If you want to grow consistently and successfully through every market cycle, you've got to start by reframing. The definition of uncertainty is a series of future events which may or may not occur. Whether or not those events are good or bad depends on what we're trying to do and how we're set up. So if you see your role as doing that, figure out what we're trying to do, and then get set up rather than reducing uncertainty, you've just opened the opportunity set to an order of magnitude more than others you're competing against.

The best pivots are changes

38:15: The best pivots are changes, not these big, massive "we're doing A, and now we're going to do B." It's about these small micro-changes and micro-adjustments as we're learning, and not necessarily tactical, right? But these micro-changes and adjustments—you know, this was one of my muscle memories and battles—you know, I'm going to kind of shift, like, you know, of these two sub-things I'm resourcing, I'm going to go from one to the other. And I'm doing that because I've got my belief tracker up.

Show Links:

Recommended Resources:

• The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses by Eric Ries
• OODA loop
• Porter’s Five Forces

Guest Profile:

• Professional Website

Her Work:

• Survive, Reset, Thrive: Leading Breakthrough Growth Strategy in Volatile Times