Planning in an Uncertain and Ambiguous Environment

Plans are worthless, but planning is everything (Eisenhower)

If there is a more people-intensive industry in Australia than Home Care, I’d be delighted to hear about it. While many industries achieve success primarily from their decisions around capital allocation (ie Qantas or BHP) Home Care is a purely Human Resource based business.

The implications of this observation are quite wide ranging, but one consequence is that there is always (and I mean always) something unexpected happening that has to be dealt with yesterday. Dealing with people, particularly when your core business concerns people in a vulnerable state, is challenging. Often our workforces don’t seem to be much more resilient either. Those drawn to work in the industry are often vulnerable, have multiple health or personal problems, and collectively require constant attention.

The temptation therefore is to deal with the urgent at the expense of the important. There’s a consultants 2x2 matrix to consider here which I won’t bother drawing, but you get the idea. As leaders, we need to be spending more time dealing with the non-urgent but important, and less with what is urgent but less important.

Whether we like it or not, we are also a government industry. This brings both benefits and challenges. The benefits include a level of predictability and process, while the challenges include a concentration of revenue and constant reform. In the next few weeks alone, our industry is responding to reforms such as the Serious Incident Response Scheme, Fee Caps, Governance Changes, and a new Code of Conduct.

The temptation for leaders is therefore to leave the longer term planning until we are certain of the parameters, and can clearly define success. Meanwhile we spend our days focused on the immediate problems in front of us. In the environment that we operate in, leaving our planning until we have a level of certainty is usually to leave it too late. We live in an uncertain and ambiguous environment, where the rules are changed at short notice, often seemingly on a whim.

Being comfortable with uncertainty and ambiguity is an essential skill that we should be looking for in leaders at every level across the industry.

There are however many ways to reduce ambiguity and uncertainty. Clearly defining success and failure in line with your organisation’s values reduces ambiguity. Focusing on gathering intelligence across the industry can help with reducing uncertainty.

As a suggestion, I’ve listed a few ideas that will assist the planning process for all organisations that are specific to our industry.

1. Stay engaged with the broader industry. Join ACCPA and read their newsletters. Attend conferences, and listen closely to the speeches of decision-makers, not just what they say, but what they don’t say. Triangulate from multiple data points to create a sense of the direction that decision makers are heading.

2. Get involved in consultation processes and attempt to influence the direction of reform where you can. ACCPA provides multiple avenues for doing this. You might feel powerless regarding the reform program, but collectively you have a powerful voice.

3. Build relationships across the industry, and have conversations about what others are seeing and hearing about the direction of reform, and how they are responding to it.

4. Segregate what you do know from what you don’t. This will give you a sense of what you can respond to early, as opposed to what you should delay until later.

5. Start the planning process early, and remain flexible as new information comes to light.

6. Engage consultants that specialise in the industry.

As an example of planning in an ambiguous and uncertain environment, consider the difference between two responses I’ve observed or participated in relating to COVID-19.

I was at an industry consultation event the week before the first lock down in March 2020, and asked another CEO what plans they had in place for the range of potential Government responses we were likely to see. I was told that they had done no planning, and didn’t really see any need.

In contrast, having had some corporate memory of previous health emergencies, we took the planning process seriously, and started early. While there was much that wasn’t known in early January, there was much that was.

• We could see the results in China, and the Chinese Government's response.

• We knew that viruses cross borders, and we were as much a part of the global network as any other country. There was a high risk that we would have to address it in Australia, and the consequences would be substantial. It was definitely a high priority business risk.

• The Government’s pandemic response documents were on-line and outlined what steps would be considered to safeguard the Australian community.

• We understood that we were providing services to the most vulnerable members of our community.

• A quick online search provided insight into the most recent global pandemic, the 1919 Spanish Flu, and the devastating death toll that was associated with it.

We knew therefore that if we were unable to stop it at our borders, we were likely to be dealing with some form of a lockdown, and with increased infection control measures.

Despite the fact that we didn’t know yet whether we would see it in Australia, how it was transmitted, or specifically who it would affect, we knew that we needed to get ahead of it. As a consequence, I sent an email to our senior leaders in late January asking that we stock up on Personal Protective Equipment (PPE), and review our systems for their suitability to support a work from home model.

When the lockdown was announced on March 18 2022, we’d had almost two full months of preparation under our belt. While we hadn’t known the exact form of the announcement, we had all the tools in place to respond to whatever was to be required. If the lockdown had never occurred, we were no worse off for having done the planning. The PPE would have been used in the following months, and the work from home review would have benefited future planning around workforce flexibility.

Consequently we moved more than 200 staff out of our offices in three days, and didn’t miss a beat regarding our customer service. Our staff reported in subsequent surveys that they appreciated the clear communication and direction they received from us, and rated us highly when it came to prioritising their safety.

As it turned out, the lockdowns were longer and harder than any of us expected. We were still left short of PPE, and struggled with many of the same issues that everyone else did. What we did have however was a significant head start, and the ability to stay on the front foot throughout the crisis. That gave us significantly more time to spend on other strategic issues than we otherwise would have had.

Planning is essential even when the environment is uncertain. In the context of the reform program, it is particularly important that organisations start immediately if they are to be in a position to respond to the announcements as they come. Most importantly, the earlier you commence planning, the more options you are likely to have. Leave it too late, and you may no longer have options that are palatable to your stakeholders.

I suspect that when we look back over this period, there will be a strong correlation between those organisations that are thriving in five years from now, and those that commenced their planning early. In other words, early planning is an important source of competitive advantage.

In the next couple of planned blogs, I will talk about the context for the reform program, and what we do and don’t know. This will assist in the planning processes that organisations are going to need to have in place commencing next year in order to respond to a reform deadline that is rapidly approaching.

Some will prepare early and take it in their stride, others will be scrambling in the middle of 2024. I would be delighted to be involved in assisting your organisation to be fully prepared for the changes we all know are coming. Please email me directly on jason.howie@howiefsc.com.au if I can assist you in your reform journey.