When the world is volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA), planning seems feeble. Why put goals in place when the world will just through a spanner into them when you least expect. Because of this unpredictability of the world, we need to become more agile in our goal creation. How do we set goals in a VUCA world?
STEP 1: Create a vision
Your vision is not what your business does but more about why you are in business. It should be focused on the customers you help and how you want to impact those in your community. A brand vision is clear and concise. This vision is what you will look to when you are in doubt about your business, or you have difficult decisions to make. You can follow the guidelines on Digglescreative.com to create a vision for your business.
STEP 2: Create tasks
With the vision in place, you can now define the tasks to be done to achieve your vision. You can break these tasks into quarterly, monthly, and daily tasks. For the daily tasks, try to sit down every morning and write down five critical tasks you need to do in the day to achieve your monthly and quarterly tasks. By keeping a record of the tasks you do, you can see how you managed to achieve your goals for your business.
STEP 3: Work collaboratively
In the past, many areas of business worked in silos; not believing that other departments had an impact on how you achieve your goals. But each department has some part in working towards achieving your global vision, therefore it is important to collaborate around goals and see how each department can contribute to achieving the goals.
STEP 4: Use your employees’ talents
Identify what each of your employees is good at and match them to areas in your business where you need those talents. By clearly defining your needs before the hiring process you should have ideally hired people with the talents you require for the position they were hired for.
STEP 5: Be adaptable
In a VUCA world, the environment you operate in might change quickly. You need to try considering every possible scenario which might come your way and consider how you could or should react to them. This will help you to have a skeleton idea of what to do when adverse situations come your way.
STEP 6: Analyse your tasks
When you have spent a week or a month on tasks associated with your ultimate goal, you need to review them. Try to identify what were successes and what were failures. From the failures, identify what caused the failure. Then identify what was in your control to prevent the failure and wasn’t in your power to prevent the failure. Try to accept the outside factors but work on the factors which you have control of.
With these six steps, many SMMEs will be able to create achievable goals to strive for even in a VUCA world.
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