"The key to [cannabis] success is failure."

This adage (sans cannabis reference) is the one thing the statement’s author Michael Jordan and I have in common.

In any cannabis business, things rarely go according to plan. Every company (and person) will fail many times.  The probability of failure with mission-critical things like new product introductions, key executive hires or IT implementations can be quite high.  Flops could be catastrophic, but they don’t have to be.

Failure is not the opposite of success.  Lots of individual and organizational benefit can be gleaned from unsuccessful initiatives and strategies including enhanced corporate learning and resilience plus leftover assets, technical knowhow, and new capabilities. You can not consistently succeed unless you can learn from your blunders.

Still, companies would prefer to succeed than stumble.   Since failure is a possibility, how do you lessen its frequency and mitigate its impact, yet still capture organizational value?  

By undertaking failure planning within the overall strategy development process.  Basically, management is analyzing in parallel what could go right and wrong - and its impact on corporate results.

It is usually helpful to bring in a trusted outsider to assist with this process.  Executives often have skills and strategy blind spots, and may be uncomfortable conveying and discussing what could go wrong (versus what will go right). 

I use a facilitative approach (below) with my clients to identify possible sources of failure and the steps needed to preempt or alleviate them: 

1) Insist on data transparency and cross functional collaboration.  Key decision makers and contributors must sing from the same data and financial song sheet;
 
2) Understand where your knowledge, talent and resource gaps are.  For example, do you have enough of the right consumer data?   Or, are there sufficient people to execute your initiative?

3) Find and challenge dangerous strategic assumptions and management biases. Cannabis firms are chockfull of these not-so-hidden potholes. You could designate a ‘Devil’s Advocate” to examine key analysis, study prior failures and apply a “what if” lens to different scenarios;

4) Factor in competition and serendipity.  Cannabis businesses don’t exist in a vacuum. I have run business war games to make the planning exercise much more realistic and collaborative;

5) Prioritize types of failure by likelihood and impact.  Create contingency plans to mitigate or lesson their impact;

6) Implement early-warning tools such as project management dashboards, social media monitoring and POS reviews to quickly identify an issue.

#failure #strategicplanning #leadership #analytics #strategy