Contingency Planning

Strategic planning is important whether your creative enterprise is large or small. If you do it right it will help you ask the right questions about what you really want your firm to do, how big it should be and what talents you require, how your resources should be spent and how much you need, and basically, how to get from where you are now to where you want to be.

Some people avoid planning because, they say, nothing ever goes according to plan anyway. And honestly, they're right. Baron von Moltke wrote about military planning in the 19th century that "no plan survives contact with the enemy," and there's a lot of truth to that. Once you have a bunch of unknowns entering into your equations, all the known vaiables in your plan suddenly seem less important.

You can try to account for this in your strategic planning by trying to address as many variables as you can, but there's a limit to what you can do before your plan gets too big to be manageable. You can also try to make your strategic plan flexible, but it's possible to get so flexible that it doesn't provide clear guidance anymore. Your other option is contingency planning.

In contingency planning, you identify some of the more likely scenarios you might face, and develop an idea how you would deal with them. It doesn't have to be intricately detailed -- you might want more detail for the more likely possibilities, but for the less likely ones you might just come up with the basic idea and fill in the blanks if it actually happens. It all depends on how much time you want to devote to this. Once you have your plans, put them on the shelf until you need them. A review every now and then would be helpful, but don't obsess over it.

You can't think of every possible situation, of course, and you shouldn't try. Contingency planning is particularly useful for addressing short-term problems that can have long-term consequences. It gives you a starting point for your response, rather than trying to come up with ideas in the midst of a problem. If you're trying to deal with the immediate aftermath of a problem it's hard to focus on permanent solutions to the underlying problem, so give yourself something to start with.

What are some situations you might think about? Well, how about if a major client suddenly cancels a contract? Or you lose a critical employee? How about serious IT problems? These are the kinds of things that can happen with no warning but can have a serious impact on your work in the short-term and your firm's survival in the long-term. Think about what's important to your business and about how you'd respond if something happened to it.

As with strategic planning, the contingency planning process is very useful, especially when it helps identify what's most important to your firm. You might even realize that, rather than worrying about contingency plans, you actually have to take some steps in your day-to-day work to address vulnerabilities.

Realize too that contingency planning doesn't have to just be about problems. You might consider certain opportunities that could come your way and ask how you'd take advantage of that. What would you do if you had more money? What will you do if a client extends a contract for another three years? Opportunities only matter if you capitalize on them.

With a collection of Creatives working for you, you're at an advantage. If you are looking for potential scenarios and the means for dealing with them, you benefit from having a group of creative thinkers helping you. they may not be doing the actual planning but you should definitely take advantage of their inputs.

Lots of people may turn their nose up at contingency planning, thinking it's a lot of time spent on something that may never happen. Then again, we spend a lot of money on insurance against events we also hope never happen. Is there really any difference?