Restart: Think in scenarios

This too, shall pass, but we will be running a Juggling Marathon until the day a vaccine is available and accessible.  

Nobody has a crystal ball, but developing scenarios for your business will allow you to better judge what needs to be done in which case. To model CASH should be preferred, since it is easy to understand, current by nature, not dependent on any accounting standards and needed for the communication with your financial stakeholders.

Here are a few thoughts for a two-step approach to build up scenarios for your business: 

Step 1: Develop specific scenarios for your business (for each state or country):

Ask your best data scientists (or consultants, obviously) to build a model specific to your company. It will be key to understand when measures might be loosened in regions relevant to your business. Data to model the impact is freely available on the internet, the math behind it is well understood and, combined with deep knowledge of the respective sector, modelling of scenarios can be done. 

Step 2: Develop measures for each scenario:But be honest with yourself as to which measures are genuinely specific to the different scenarios. It is very likely that many measures will need to be implemented in any case.

My colleague Graeme Smith shared some ideas on how we might be "on/off" for a while, Steve Braude talks about implications for soccer teams and Matt Clark shares his views for the non-food retailers. Some ideas on how digital tools might help during these uncertain times can be found here.  

It might also be a good idea to review ideas already discussed in your organization and that you have always wanted to implement. No more procrastination. Even in the worst scenario model, having as much cash leeway as possible allows significant strength.  

The toughest part - at least in some parts of the world - may be to try to predict how politics will react to scenarios. But it will remain crucial to have a view (or rather, views / scenarios) and work closely with your communications teams in the respective cities. Some parts of the world may come closer together as a consequence of this, while others may not.