In the military, missions depend on every soldier’s situational awareness. Noticing something out of the ordinary when a soldier is at war can be the difference between life and death. I’m not exaggerating either.
For example, a seemingly innocent pile of rocks can indicate a potentially deadly situation. Enemies would frequently use stacks of rocks as an aiming marker to know when to detonate IED’s buried under or next to the road. As long as the bomb was in between the stack of rocks and the enemy, they could use it as a visual queue to know when to detonate the bomb.
As business owners, we often times get so caught up in the day-to-day of our own jobs, whether it’s client deliverables, payroll, or inventory and supply issues, that we forget to pay attention to what’s going on in the world around us.
- Are there regulatory or legal changes that are or could affect how you do business?
- Do you need to worry about new competitors entering the market?
- Are your customers looking for something that you’re not offering?
- Is there a new (or improved) technology that can be leveraged to make what you do or how you do it better?
These are simple examples. Each business will have their own unique circumstances that they need to pay attention to. Can you think of 4-5 situations that could impact your business in either a positive or negative way? How are you taking advantage of those positive situations? What are you doing to negate the negatives?
I want to talk a little bit about situational awareness. In the military situational awareness is critical to the success or failure of your mission. By definition, situational awareness involves being aware of what’s happening around you, including how the information that you’re receiving, events that are taking place, or actions that are going on will impact your goals or objectives of whatever your mission happens to be. Now, in the military we’d look for things that were out of the ordinary when we’re out on a mission, and no details were really too small. So, for example, this is maybe more of an obvious example, but someone wearing a big heavy winter coat in the middle of summer would probably be a red flag for us because that person could very easily be hiding a bomb or a gun or something like that underneath this jacket. So, we’d look for things like that. Another example is maybe a less obvious, is a freshly paved patch of road. The reason why we’d look out for that is because someone could have overnight gone in, dug up the road, buried a bomb underneath the road, paved over it, and then the next day when we’re driving over that freshly paved patch of road they could detonate the bomb. So, those are things, like, in your day to day life those don’t really seem like too big of a deal. So what if someone’s wearing a jacket? They might just be cold, or so what if the road is paved? I’d actually prefer it, so now I don’t have to drive over potholes, but in the military when we’re out on missions and we kind of had to think a little bit like our enemies who were trying to get sneaky ways to try to get us. Now, in a business setting, situational awareness isn’t likely going to have those life and death kind of consequences depending on what your business is, but in most businesses you’re probably talking more situational awareness like what’s happening in the market or the economy and things like that. That type of thing is what you really need to be focused on in a business context. Now, there are three things to kind of be aware of in your business to help you focus in on the situation and gain that kind of awareness. The first thing is like the context or what’s happening in your business and your industry and things like that. So, are new competitors coming into the market? Are they offering a product that’s comparable to yours at a lower price? Or are they coming in with a brand new revolutionary product that’s going to blow your product out of the water? That type of thing is something that you might need to be aware of. Also, customer demands, right? So, if customers are starting to demand something that your product doesn’t do, but your competitor’s product does do they’re going to be moving over to your competitor and they’re not going to be hanging out and kind of focusing on your product for too much longer. The circumstances or things that have happened, happened in the past. So, for example if you put out a new product and it faced lackluster market response. Customers were just not responding to it the way you thought they would. That’s a circumstance of something that’s happened. You’ve already introduced the product. The customers are already not really all that interested in it and it could be for a number of reasons. Maybe your pricing is wrong or maybe the placement of the product in stores and things like that is not catching the eye of anyone or maybe your promotional efforts are just not what that particular product needed. So, those are the circumstances, so you might have to adjust what you’re doing, but based on the response that you have gotten you should be able to figure out whether or not this is even a product that you should be offering. You might have thought it’s some this great, revolutionary thing, but it may not be anything that anyone needs. So, you have to kind of consider, is this something that we want to continue selling or is this something that we want to maybe scale back on and maybe not do so much of? Third thing is consequences. So, what could happen? So, think about before your launched that new product and you’re thinking to yourself, you know what? This is going to be great. This is going to be revolutionary. This is going to be a great new product. Let’s produce a million units of it right off the bat, before we even start selling this product I want to have a stockpile of this stuff so we don’t run out when everyone’s rushing to the stores to buy this product. Then, what happens when that product flops and no one buys it? And now you’re sitting with a million units of unusable inventory. So, those are the consequences. What’s going to happen? You’re probably going to have cash flow problems. You’re probably going to have warehouse, like storage issues where now you’re not going to be able to store the products that actually are being sold because you have to store this junk product that no one’s buying. So, are the three things that you really want to keep in mind when you’re in a business setting when you’re thinking about the situational awareness of what’s going on around you. So, the context, things that are happening right now, the circumstance, things that have happened, and consequences, things that could happen. So, think about all of those things. Could be from a legislative standpoint, could be other environmental standpoints, the market. All those kinds of things are stuff that you need to keep in mind when you’re running your business to keep going forward and be aware of the situations that your business is going to face.
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