Contingency planning isn’t about living in fear. It’s about being smart. It’s about protecting what you’ve worked so hard to build—your people, your reputation, your financial stability—so that when the wind shifts, you can adjust your sails instead of capsizing.
Change is a fact of life. Like or not we will get older. Our minds will get sharper then grow duller. Out bodies will get hard then grow softer. Friends will come and go. Loved ones will enter this world while others exit. If we have children, they will grow up and become independent adults and leave the nest. Our careers will follow a natural arc of emergence, growth, maturity and decline. We will have periods of minimal responsibility and other moments where it feels like we are overwhelmed with life/work obligations. It is difficult to grasp at times, but very few things will ever stay the same.
If you want to grow your company to the next level, your thinking and actions must be dynamic and proactive. You need to outthink the competition, anticipate market changes, build more sophisticated delivery systems, make strategic financial decisions, and focus on building high-performance work cultures rather than relying on interpersonal relationships. You need to be focused, but you also need to be quick on your feet and adaptable to shifting internal and external variables. You must get all the parts of your organization working harmoniously toward a common objective, regardless of what happens. You must be able to hit any pitches that come your way.
What defines a life is how we deal with the unexpected. Adversity and challenge will rise up and confront us all, sometimes when we LEAST expect it. We will feel that we did everything right and still things didn’t work out. What then? Bad things do happen to good people.
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