The Plan B You Never Write Down Is the One That Costs You Most

The favorable scenario is not the most likely

In virtually every organization and club we work with, there is an ambitious strategic plan for the favorable scenario. Almost none has anything similar for when that scenario does not play out. Here is what we have learned:

• Most strategies are designed for the best possible scenario, not the most likely one.
• The plan B that never gets written down does not disappear, it just gets improvised at the worst possible moment.
• The organizations that best withstand a setback are not the ones that foresaw it, but the ones that had already decided what to do if it happened.

Improvising under pressure costs more than deciding beforehand

We see leadership committees presenting ambitious annual goals, with clear milestones and a convincing story about why they will be met. That same meeting rarely spends time on the uncomfortable question: what happens if they are not. Something similar happens in sport with season planning, which rarely takes seriously a scenario of mass injuries, a poor start, or losing a key player.

When the setback arrives, and it almost always does at some point, the organization improvises under pressure, with the clock running and emotions in the mix. The decisions made in that moment tend to be worse than the ones that could have been made calmly, months earlier, thinking coolly about what to do if the favorable scenario did not hold.

• Strategic plans that only consider the scenario where everything goes well.
• Crisis decisions improvised under pressure that could have been designed in advance.
• Leadership teams surprised, every time, by setbacks that had already happened before.

Resilience is having decided with a cool head

Our read is that an organization's resilience does not depend on whether bad things happen to it, they always will, but on whether it had already calmly decided what to do when they did.

Designing alternative scenarios does not mean putting the same effort into the main plan and every possible variant. It means identifying the two or three most likely setbacks and deciding, with a cool head, what to do if they occur. That prior decision completely changes the quality of the response when the setback actually arrives.

Three steps to write plan B without duplicating the work

Bringing plan B into strategic planning does not require duplicating the work, it requires one well focused additional conversation.

1. Identify the two or three most likely setbacks, not every possible one
   • Choose the ones with the highest real probability based on the organization's recent experience.
   • Trying to cover every possible scenario dilutes the effort and none get treated with real depth.
2. Calmly decide what would be done in each case
   • Define the response before pressure and emotions become part of the equation.
   • Write it down, even briefly, so it does not depend on one person's memory.
3. Review those plans with the same seriousness as the main plan
   • Update the alternative scenarios every time the overall strategy is reviewed.
   • An outdated plan B is almost as useless as having none at all.

Before finalizing the next plan

Before finalizing your next strategic or season plan, it is worth asking:

• Does your strategic plan consider any scenario other than the most favorable one?
• Could you name the two most likely setbacks of the coming year without much thought?
• Would you know what to do if each of them happened, or would you decide in the moment?
• The last time something went wrong, was the response calm or improvised?
• Has anyone written those decisions down, or do they only live in one or two people's heads?

Don't leave hard decisions for the worst moment

This is not about planning for failure, it is about not leaving the most important decisions for the worst possible moment to make them.

If your current planning only considers the favorable scenario, let's talk. Designing those two or three alternative scenarios together is usually a short conversation with an impact far greater than its length.