Use a Compass Where Your Map May Fail: How Guiding Principles Help Us Succeed in Uncertainty
Use a Compass Where Your Map May Fail: How Guiding Principles Help Us Succeed in Uncertainty
Your team just spent weeks creating the perfect project plan. Every step is defined, every timeline is set. Then a key teammate leaves, new technology emerges, or customer needs change.
Your perfect map is no longer guiding movement toward your goal.
In today's quickly changing market, relying only on a rigid, step-by-step plan is like navigating a new city with an old paper map. It can't account for detours or new construction. What if, in addition to your map, your team had a compass? A tool that didn’t dictate the exact path but always pointed you toward your destination, allowing you to adapt to any uncharted roadblocks.
That is the power of guiding principles.
Where Rigid Process Can Fail
Rigid processes are designed for certainty. They work beautifully when the inputs and outputs are predictable. The problem is that rigid steps and process may fail you in uncertainty. When an unpredicted event occurs, a strict plan can’t tell your team what to do.
This leaves your people in a difficult position:
- They wait for new direction, causing delays that cost you opportunities.
- They stick to the broken process, leading to frustration and wasted effort.
- They make a guess, which can lead to isolated actions misaligned with your goals.
In a quickly changing environment, you need a more resilient approach.
Be Prepared to Use a Compass
Instead of trying to predict every possible future, you can prepare your organization to handle uncertainty by establishing a set of guiding principles.
The goal is to define expected habits and importance to be applied in uncertain situations. These principles don't prescribe exact steps. Instead, they inform how your team should think and make decisions when the path isn't clear. This is crucial because guiding principles can allow teams or systems to adapt toward an outcome, even when the original plan has failed.
One such simple, and common, principle is "The Customer Comes First". Organizations use this to establish a culture where customer satisfaction stays the highest priority when standard procedure breaks down.
From Surviving to Thriving
In our Root to Reach™ framework, we teach a set of adaptive guiding principles that do more than just navigate roadblocks. Truly adaptive systems can go beyond just surviving uncertainty; they can thrive when they retain and learn from the adaptation. Each challenge becomes an opportunity to learn, making the entire organization stronger and more resilient for the future.
By establishing adaptive guiding principles, you build an organization that is prepared for change. You create a culture where every team member is empowered to make smart, aligned decisions in the face of the unexpected. Stop trying to create the perfect map and start preparing your team to use a compass where the map may fail.