Contain Delay Research Mitigate

These are the much publicised ‘four strands’ of the UK government‘s ‘battle plan’, echoing the world’s health experts’ coping strategy, against the novel coronavirus from Wuhan currently spreading across the planet.

My business antennae perked first with similar quartets. Such as the classic PDCA cycle. Whilst realising that this is not that type of iterative ‘wheel’, but more the linear, timeline approach.

Where these two do share dna, is in that they both aim to ameliorate something. One seeks to subvert a new bug (‘flatten the curve of the epidemic’, or [update 12 March] as UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson illuminated, “squash the sombrero” on the graph), the other improve machinations of organisation.

It makes you wonder how useful a slide with these four words on might be in a salesdeck trying to exhort the merits of a proposed change.

It would certainly be a different – and therefore hopefully more memorable – method of framing the issue at hand than your competition may likely conjure.

Contain can refer to the ‘item’ that may be wobbling. Or how the issue requiring ‘treatment’ may manifest itself.

Delay may be about how your prospect currently applies the sticking plaster to that said something. Keeping it from hampering the rest of the business, for now.

Research, well, surely you’re helping them do just that right now. Also giving you a neat side-door into asking how they tend to evaluate such findings.

Mitigate by way of action. Your action. Delightfully crafted to fit snugly with how they wish to proceed.

…Where do they sign?