The key to planning in an uncertain economy? Ruthless prioritization
Today’s executives are currently contending with what may be one of the most unsettled business environments of the past 40 years. Along with the lingering effects of the pandemic, a war in Eastern Europe, sky-high inflation, and an emerging recession, leaders are facing many resource constraints, from persistent supply chain-related issues to lingering worker shortages that have squeezed teams and burned out employees. And it’s not only these issues, but how fast everything is changing. As companies begin to lay out their 2023 goals, all of this volatility and uncertainty makes it extremely difficult to plan.
For decades, executives have been taught to do more with less, but in an uncertain economy, the best way for companies to plan is to cut back on the growing list of priorities and do less—a lot less. Leaders need to resist the urge to make too many things a strategic imperative and practice what’s known as “ruthless prioritization.”
The need for speed
Look at it this way: If you have one major priority to achieve with your available resources, it will require a certain amount of time. If you double the number of priorities, it will take twice as long with the same resources. The more relaxed timetable might have been feasible in a slow-changing world—but today, speed counts. A project that takes too long to come to fruition is all too often born into a world that no longer needs it.
So, the answer is to do fewer things faster. Learn from the successes—and from the failures and imperfections that inevitably happen along the way. If you can truly devote all your attention to a single priority, chances are it will provide momentum for the next project. And your next project might find you in a completely different world than the one you started out in.
Hitting a bull’s-eye through the fog
The trick to ruthless prioritization is selecting the right initiative to focus on. Choosing wisely means predicting meaningful shifts shortly before they occur. And that in turn requires sensing, understanding, and amplifying “weak signals,” insights driven by a deep understanding of the growing customer needs that lurk in the foggy information companies collect every day.
Machine learning and AI, the cloud, and data science can make sense of that data to help companies identify weak signals, but identification and prediction are only part of the solution. Action is essential. In a volatile environment, it’s important to build radical agility and responsiveness into everything you do to allow for speedy actions, creating a culture of continuous iteration of products and solutions.
For instance, in my own company, Genpact, we picked up weak signals in 2021 from semiconductor manufacturers and buyers that microprocessor supply constraints were on the horizon. We understood that the ramifications would be felt across industries the world over. We knew we had only a short time to help our manufacturing clients, so we doubled down on building solutions that helped the industry diversify risk in the semiconductor supply chain as well as plan for and prioritize demand.
We would not have been able to succeed if we had been juggling too many projects and priorities all at once.
Narrowing the focus on tech
The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated the move to the cloud and expedited digital transformation. Many companies crunched their five-year roadmap to digitize into two years. The world continues to change at a rapid pace, unlocking unique challenges with each new macroeconomic development, and technologies are central to enterprises keeping up. But as we know, too much of a good thing can be a bad thing.
Focusing on the top one or two tech projects and driving them forward with gusto can be a game changer. Organizations will see higher adoption rates and can better use resources to understand the customer and employee to ultimately deliver a superior experience.
When prioritizing, look at every business process. Scale back your sales strategy to focus on the right customers. Examine your talent acquisition strategy and make sure you’re hiring for the right skills to meet those priorities.
Perhaps one day we will return to a more predictable economy that operates at a slower pace—although I wouldn’t count on it. It’s more likely that ruthless prioritization will become the new normal for a more complex and challenging world.
Tiger Tyagarajan is chief executive officer of Genpact, a global professional services firm focused on digital transformation.
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