Today’s business climate is exceptionally volatile and complex. In this type of pressure-packed environment, it is essential to reassess all of the strategic assumptions that have been the foundation of your planning efforts. We no longer have the luxury of being able to take for granted that shifting trends will be easy to see or that customer needs will be stable.
As so many external forces influence the ongoing value of your print business, it has become more essential to challenge the assumptions you use for your strategic planning purposes. Going forward, success requires detailed scrutiny to determine how much risk you really face. This scrutiny also will help better anticipate the changing needs of your customers.
Assumption Flaws
When assessing the assumptions that you use for your decision-making, there are several critical flaws that you must avoid. These assumption flaws include internal beliefs based on incorrect information or errors in how the assumptions have been developed.
Going forward, success requires detailed scrutiny to determine how much risk you really face. This scrutiny also will help better anticipate the changing needs of your customers.
Most leaders believe they already know the most critical assumptions that impact their organization. Typically, if you have been working in your industry for a long time, it is likely that you have a strong point of view about how things should be done and your own expectation of what your customers need.
Yet all too often, it becomes easy to get locked into a belief paradigm that causes you to stop paying attention to what is really happening in the evolving world around you. Customer expectations change. Budgets and priorities shift. Competitors make aggressive moves. Tactics that previously worked well are no longer getting the same response from your customers.
If this sounds like your situation, it is the time to reassess and relieve the pressure.
Review Your Strategic Assumptions
Set aside time to fully reassess all of the assumptions you use. This will help you develop strategies that leverage new opportunities offered by changing trends impacting the print and marketing services industry. It also will provide you with new insight to help you better anticipate the potential impact of these changes and others you may need to consider.
Stepping back to determine the critical strategic assumptions you are using for your decision criteria will also afford you with an opportunity to identify changes that need to be made before these new or emerging trends wreak havoc on the future financial stability or long-term viability of your printing company.
The prism used for how you view the external world creates a bias in how you interpret the information you receive and how you perceive the potential impact of this information. As a result, it becomes easy to minimize the impact of changing external forces.
This is especially challenging when you are busy dealing with the pressures of the responsibilities of your day job. It is easy to lose sight of the external environment around you. You assume that everything is staying the same or will be going back to normal.
But yet, after coming through the intensity of a period of economic volatility, it is essential to consider the true impact of those market changes on your business or organization.
Historically, printing is a craft-oriented business and it is easy to get conditioned to a certain way of thinking. Make sure, however, that you have more than just a superficial understanding of the issues at hand. Review your strategic assumptions from outside of the traditional perspective so you can better navigate the complex variables impacting your customers and their decision-making processes.
Ensuring that your inside team also has a comprehensive understanding of the potential impact of complex external forces that affect the print business will help them be better stewards of your company’s future.
Gaining a Deeper Understanding
When you are operating in a complex economic environment, a deeper understanding is required of the complexity of issues that affect your decision-making. Reassessing your assumptions encourages you to ask the hard questions about the market forces influencing your business. It also reexamines your assumptions about your customers in terms of both their decision criteria and what triggers their purchasing behavior.
Reviewing your assumptions also ensures that the most critical questions about your future are discussed well in advance of them impacting your bottom line. This requires your ability to realistically assess the influence of how these other factors impact your situation. This effort provides opportunities to deepen your value to customers and overcome the pressure you are most likely feeling.
It is imperative to consider how the assumptions you currently are using may be adding pressure and undermining your ability to make better long-range decisions. Re-evaluating your assumptions with an objective perspective will help you identify the shifts you need to make and provide the insight you need to obtain to move your decision-making forward in the most effective manner.
Better Assumptions Relieve Pressure
Good assumptions are based on accurate information and this information needs to be continually updated. The most critical factor that determines how rapidly you can get clarity is grounded in the quality of the assumptions that you use to evaluate your decision options.
We must become even more observant to stay on top of evolving trends within the graphics arts industry. Those shifts and changes can fundamentally alter the viability of our assumptions. As a result, we need to continually update our understanding of what is impacting the decisions we make.
It is imperative to consider how the assumptions you currently are using may be distorting your situation and undermining your ability to make better long-range decisions.
Good print leaders are always willing to assess how changing assumptions can benefit their bottom line or create new revenue streams. You have to monitor data to shake out the changes that are not obvious on a macro view. This takes discipline and effort.
Reassessing your assumptions about the future will make you a better strategic thinker and give you deeper insight into how your marketplace needs are likely to change. Encourage your trusted advisors and key employees to help you challenge the assumptions you currently use in your organization for decision-making.
Be on the lookout for emerging trends and how they may affect the print industry overall. Those emerging concerns or challenges that are on the horizon might affect your decision-making approaches. It is always safe to assume that new pressure points will emerge and that something is going to change.
