3 Ways to Prepare for a Future You Can’t Predict

Companies don’t have the luxury of waiting for a stable decision-making environment

Illustration: Shira Inbar

Prior to the pandemic, I had been advising a business on forecasting their projected revenue based on their sales pipeline. This involved meticulously reviewing their leads to determine both the size of the potential sale and the likelihood the sale would close in order to calculate the expected value of each lead, then turning these into a weighted average that could serve as a more accurate and reliable forecast of projected revenue.

After the pandemic hit, I went back to them to ask if they had made adjustments to the forecasts I’d helped them create. They hadn’t. “There’s too much uncertainty,” they said. “Because we don’t have any idea of what’s going to happen, we figured we’d just wait until things settle down and we have more information before updating our forecasts.”

In other words, even though they understood the value of making these kinds of forecasts, and using expected values to improve the accuracy of their revenue projections, they were so overwhelmed by uncertainty that they didn’t want to even attempt updating their plans for the future.

This client was hardly the only company thinking this way. As Marker’s Rob Walker pointed out…