Writers have a concept known as “murder your darlings” which refers to the onerous task of deleting loved lines, scenes or characters to improve the overall story.
I have come to believe that business leaders need to do something similar, and honestly, it is one of the harder lessons I have learned.
It means being willing to look at your entire business during risk assessments, identify what changes need to be made to strengthen its resilience or performance, and make sometimes painful calls as a result.
This is not about saying that what you decided years or even decades ago is wrong, it is about keeping pace with threats and opportunities that never stop moving.
If you founded your business 25 years ago, you founded it in a world before social media, before iPhones, and well before genAI tools sat on every PC.
The risks have evolved and are continuing to. And organisations have to evolve with them.
As business owners and leaders our instinct is to protect the business, but that often becomes being overly protective of the business. If we are not careful, we start to see the business through rose-tinted glasses. Especially if we built it from the ground up.
This system is fantastic because we made it. It is ours and it is served us well for 5,10, 20 years. Why fix what is not broken?
I understand that instinct.
It can be hard to look for ways that your business is vulnerable, but you are doing it not to undermine what you created, but to protect its future.
Businesses that continue to thrive through a variety of changes and challenges do so by adapting to their environment. By cutting back the dead or dying parts of processes and systems and focusing on what works and what can grow in this new environment.
How can you do that?
- Conduct regular SWOT analyses – revisit how your strengths and weaknesses have shifted alongside evolving threats and opportunities. What served you well five years ago might not serve you now.
- Keep an up-to-date risk register – document the risks facing your organisation honestly and keep revisiting it. Things change quickly; your register should too.
- Scenario planning and crisis training – Once you understand your weaknesses and the risks you face, you can plan for them and train your team to manage them with confidence.
This last approach is an opportunity to get creative. Instead of listing all of the scenarios that you are worried about, spin it on its head. Ask yourself and the team ‘how would I actively break this company?’ By setting yourself the challenge to destroy everything it frees you up to go to the absolute worst-case scenarios and essentially do a ‘pre-mortem’. It is weirdly freeing.
None of this works, though, unless you are willing to be completely honest with yourself about where your organisation is weak, and unless you are willing to actually make the changes that follow.
It is not always comfortable. But it is how you keep something you have built alive for the long run.
The world moves quickly and you cannot rely on the systems and processes that worked when you founded your company to protect you against the risks you face now.
Sometimes you need to be brave enough to change direction and kill off what is not working anymore.
