While preparing for a webinar for human resources professionals I’ll be delivering later today, at the request of the client I was focused on ways to avoid worst-case HR scenarios.
The first method I’ll be offering for avoiding major problems are an awareness of the five primary reasons for bad outcomes as drawn from the interviews with forty athlete/executives when we were writing Business Lessons from the Edge.
The second method is a tool called Contingency Thinking, which is also from Business Lessons from the Edge. Contingency Thinking centers on thinking through in advance how you will handle a difficult situation, should it occur. You can readily see how this would be a popular strategy for successful business people who are also accomplished extreme athletes.
The third device is something that is familiar to anyone who has been following this blog, Intelligent Risk-Taking, which is from my book The Power of Risk. Intelligent Risk-Taking involves taking six specific steps that have the effect of increasing the chances of a desirable outcome and decrease the chances of an undesirable outcome for any risk or initiative.
The interesting commonality that surfaced while preparing for the webinar is that both Contingency Thinking and Intelligent Risk-Taking require discipline to be effective – the discipline to apply them faithfully.
This almost falls into the category of counter-intuitive. The common perception is that talented risk-takers are impulsive. The opposite is true. Talented risk-takers are actually methodical and disciplined.
