Or should you?
It’s been tough living with constant uncertainty coming from different directions at different time concerning different elements of supply chain and business.
If only you could just get one thing off your plate, things would be better.
This is where I see many businesses falling into the “productivity” and “get it done now” trap.
Let’s face it, it feels good to actually do something.
But if that doing ends up holding tight to the status quo, or even worse, changing to accommodate a quick win without looking at the whole, then the “feel good” goes away very fast.
Why?
Because it’s easy to do something, anything, to make it feel as if you are actively changing your environment from uncertain to certainty. And you do, but usually only for a brief moment.
You have to play the paradox: the only way to go fast is to go slow.
Slow means planning.
Fast means repeatedly solving the same problems.
While supply chain managers are used to S&OP planning, this is more strategic.
This planning aligns the different tactical planning that then leads to the “do this do that”.
It creates guardrails with objective metrics monitoring potential risks so that you have advanced notice and can stand up the mitigation plan waiting in the wings.
It uses data to point to which option to choose to avoid or minimize risk.
It uses the immense creativity and brainpower of your workforce to fully and holistically understand why things come about, how they manifest, and what has consistently gone wrong with previous solution attempts.
Because you worked as a team and aligned solutions across functional areas and supply chain requirements, terrific work is not localized just to small areas of the organization without considerations of the fuller reality of the organization.
While the reality of paralysis by analysis is true – such as in design work, when it comes to keeping supply chains running and systems working, the “do this do that” reigns.
You’ll often hear, some version of: “I’ve seen this before. Just let me fix it. I know what to do.”
How many times do you have to repeat a fix even though it doesn’t last?
This is where strategic planning comes in.
While it takes some time, it also gets to the root causes underlying why certain uncertainty keeps coming back to cause you pain.
Does this mean you won’t ever experience uncertainty?
No, but you will have a plan for dealing with it, or a plan that doesn’t exactly address what is going on but you can pinpoint the plan’s shortfalls and work through them.
And with the uncovering of root causes comes the need for executive support to truly fix the systemic strategy, policy, and cultural elements that continue to leave you scrambling. These elements are discovered/uncovered during careful analysis, worked cross-functionally and even cross-business unit so that a robust solution set can be developed that is flexible enough to allow for adjustment as required while also enabling localized solutions that still fit into the strategic alignment required.
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