“Uncertainty is here to stay. Rather than seeing it as an obstacle to overcome, integrate it into your strategic approach to invigorate your high-growth potential and outperform competition under any market condition,” explains Rebecca Homkes, author of the book, Survive, Reset, Thrive.
“Most books aren’t honest enough about how hard it is to reset,” adds Homkes. Yet, resetting and leaning into change is essential. “If you are ready to embrace change as a central element of your growth strategy, this book is for you.”
Homkes’ book is a timely, comprehensive, and essential read for business leaders looking to take the next step toward ensuring high growth for their companies. The book brings together more than 15 years of Homkes working directly with high-growth companies of all sizes and across a wide variety of industries.
Survive, Reset, Thrive (SRT) is a practical and innovative interconnected three-mode approach:
Survive: Stabilizing your business when a shot hits. Taking proactive measures. Moving quickly in response to disruptions.
Reset: Resetting your strategy when the situation changes. Note that the power of getting to Thrive is in the Reset. Reset, or how to change, is the heart of SRT.
Thrive: Employing an adaptable strategy through evolving market conditions. Keep in mind that Thrive is not a given; it must be earned. You must execute with agility and learn along the way to a sustainable, successful, high-growth path.
In addition, Homkes shares that SRT is a loop, not a line. “Sometimes you must go back to Survive before Thrive. You may be in Thrive for months, or years, but then find yourself needing to move into Survive to re-stabilize.” In addition, “Even though the book is written directly to the leader, going through the Survive, Reset, Thrive loop is a team activity, not an individual one,” adds Homkes.
Leaders should also work to avoid SRT Leadership Traps – traps such as, getting in your own way, succumbing to paralysis by analysis, allowing your Board to be your customer and rushing the Reset.
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Homkes shares these additional insights with us:
Question: You describe SRT as a loop, not a line. Why is it important for leaders to conceptualize the strategy as a continuous practice, rather than a checklist?
Homkes: Growth through uncertainty is a loop, not a line. One of the hardest things about strategy, and the jobs it gives leaders, is that it’s never done,” a checkmark you can complete.
While a linear checklist feels easier to conceptualize, it is unfortunately not what the real-world demands. We may be in Survive, go to Reset, and then be in Thrive but then get kicked back to Reset, or even Survive. Know that these loops represent growth!
But continuous loops are emotionally challenging, as once you are in the Thrive mode you want to stay there. Embracing this is as a loop you will cycle through forces you to be heads up – acknowledging how the situation is progressing around you, and always watching for signs and signals, which can bring new opportunities.
Growth is a learning cycle with constant loops of testing, gaining insights, implementing, sharing, and iterating for improvement. Linear models of growth neglect the realities of the changing world around us and lull us into a false sense of security. Embracing the loop sets us up for the opportunities this approach brings.
Question: Which part of SRT is the most important and why?
Homkes: The entire loop! Each mode of the Survive, Reset, Thrive loop is critical, and you should build capability in, or get great, at each mode. What is often hardest, though, is the transition between the modes; that is, knowing when to move from Survive to Reset, and when to move from Reset to Thrive, as well as how to successfully manage this transition.
Placing more importance on any one piece as more important can lead to failure to Thrive, as you will not have the capability to successfully move between modes.
Where you want to spend the most time is Thrive, and you perform there by continuing to execute with agility and learning – being open to changes in the strategic situation and bringing those into your adaptable strategy. Staying in Thrive is also helped by employing “steady state Survive.” Good Survive is proactive Survive, and Steady state Survive is made up of the continual proactive measures leaders can take to ensure long-term stabilization.
To elaborate on the three modes:
The Survive, Reset, Thrive mode consists of three, interconnected modes, which involve:
Survive: Proactive stabilization of the organization. This mode starts by preparing your organization to withstand system shocks by employing “steady state” Survive, which are proactive steps taken even when markets are frothy. When a shock (either internal or external) hits, your organization moves into “triggered Survive.” Here you employ “Survive Basics,” or the 4 C’s: Cash, Cost, Customer (retention, loyalty, stickiness), and Communication. These basics will not be enough, so you will also need to perform your “Survive Power Moves,” which include repurposing and partnering, strengthening employee engagement, building deeper customer moats, and finding and exploiting industry imbalances. But the most critical move to transitioning from Survive is strengthening learning velocity.
Reset: Reset is the power move of the SRT loop, as this involves revisiting your strategy for growth questions (What is the situation, and how will this change? What is success? Where should we play? How will we win? What could stop us? What should we do?), updating your beliefs and assumptions, and preparing and enabling the needed change. Reset is hard as Resets involve change, which is difficult for individuals and harder still for organizations.
Thrive is the mode after the Reset when you achieve sustainable, repeatable, high-performance. Thrive comes from bringing the strong balance sheet from the Survive mode, the strategic insights from the Reset mode, and then executing with agility and learning.
Question: Because we cannot predict the future, you encourage leaders to stop planning, and start preparing. What is the difference, and what can leaders do to develop a pragmatic strategy in times of uncertainty?
Homkes: In uncertainty, we cannot make perfect plans because we cannot predict what will happen. But we can prepare for what could happen. Strict planning forces us to see change as bad, a risk to be catered for rather than a groundswell of possible new opportunity. Plans ask us to review regularly and ask the question: Are we on track? While this is a perfectly reasonable question, it assumes the plan got everything right, there is only one track, and no new information has become available. In uncertainty those assumptions are usually wrong.
Setting ourselves up for success when facing uncertainty is hard because we cannot predict the future. This makes the planning challenge one of how to master making great decisions, even though we cannot make great predictions. It is the quality of decision-making that sets apart those who lead growth from those who barely survive, so embrace more robust decision-making by shifting to preparing rather than only strict planning.
A few ways to do this are to:
- Make decisions based on beliefs, not always waiting for facts.
- Acknowledge the strategic situation is still emerging and will need a more probabilistic approach rather than strict linear planning.
- Set a direction, or compass heading, rather than a precise destination (or a specific end point).
- Understand the goalposts are moving, not mixed, and we can only get clearer on the end state as we move and learn.
- Optimize for robustness, not just efficiency.
Preparation shifts your perception of change from a risk to protect yourself from, to a growth opportunity. In times of uncertainty, shifting from planning to preparing helps support clearer decision-making instead of rash predictions. It involves overcoming both hubris and fear to achieve decisiveness and adaptability. It generates knowledge of what is initially unknown, and so creates learning. And, companies that learn faster, grow faster.
Question: Are there any good examples of companies that have successfully undergone the SRT loop?
Homkes: The Survive, Reset, Thrive book is filled with examples of companies that successfully traversed the SRT journey! Thrive happens when you bring the strong balance sheet from the Survive mode, the strategic insights from the Reset mode, and then begin executing with agility and learning. Thrive companies are learning, performing, and growing stronger and faster than others.
Gordon Food Services, the largest family-owned and managed food distributor in North America, successfully went through SRT, and they also showed that large companies can be agile and adaptive.
As restrictions changed in late 2020, the team knew agility would be critical to gaining advantage, and that their strategic choices would be based on beliefs that needed to be constantly tested. They rewrote all their most critical and impactful strategic beliefs into a set of questions and surveyed thousands of restaurants in the USA and Canada quarterly, and as new information and insights came in, they adjusted their priorities and related activities within their strategy.
Another favorite example is Lund Gruppen, which is a fourth-generation family company in Scandinavia that owns amusement parks, zoos, and festivals. Covid was disastrous to their industry, and business, but their park teams, including Skanes Djurpark team based in Sweden, executed the SRT playbook, emerging from Survive faster than all others and transitioned into Reset by splitting the team into two: offense and defense.
The offense team began the Reset with active learning and experimentation while the defense team maintained the Survive metrics, ensuring they moved successfully with an engaged team. Despite the capacity restrictions, the park had its highest profitability, customer NPS, and employee engagement that year, and the years to come.
The WD-40 Company is another that used the SRT playbook to great success following 2020 (including referencing it in their annual report), and the leadership team continues to build upon its principles including active belief setting and testing and building learning velocity as a global competitive advantage. The WD-40 Company and The Gorilla Glue Company are also two companies that I profile in the book as a rare example of when your culture can be competitive advantage and provide you a strategic Right to Win.
Dozens of members of the Young President’s Organization (YPO) also employ the SRT playbook for their strategy, including Primekss, a concrete contractor based in Latvia that doubled every three years using the approach.
SAC, a YPO’er, based in Saudia Arabia went from a company stuck in extreme Survive mode to company to Thrive (going from net losses to over 10% profitability). SAC is an example of what I call a “Hard Reset” or the strategic situation when you need to Reset all or almost all your choices.
Other examples of companies that underwent a Hard Reset before becoming Thrive are Burberry, Ducati, Dell, Tesco (the UK-based grocer).
Airbnb is a great example of a company that endured Survive mode successfully – making tough choices while still strengthening communication, repurposing and partnering, and employee engagement (the survive “power moves”), performed a successful Reset, including shelving many expansion plans and refocusing on its core, and is arguably still Thriving, despite being in the constantly shifting industry of travel and hospitality. Airbnb also provides examples of what it takes to “act to shape” or take strategic action to shift and alter the landscape around you while performing constant acting to learn!
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Rebecca Homkes is a high-growth strategy specialist and CEO and executive advisor. She is a Lecturer at the London Business School, Faculty at Duke Corporate Executive Education, Advisor for Boston Consulting Group University, and a former fellow at the London School of Economics Centre for Economic Performance.
A global keynote speaker and recognized thought leader, she is also the global Faculty Director of the Active Learning Program with the Young Presidents Organization (YPO), leads several fintech accelerators, and serves on the Boards of many high-growth companies. She earned her doctorate at the London School of Economics as a Marshall Scholar and is now based in Miami, San Francisco, USA, and London. UK.
Thank you to the book’s publisher for sending me a copy of the book.
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