If your company works with or for the government, you may be struggling. At the very least you’re probably worried or unsure about what’s to come in the near future – or even tomorrow.  If you’re a government contractor especially, you may even feel like a walking target, waiting powerlessly for the worst-case scenario to come and knock you down.

This is understandable. But you don’t have to wait around idly, frozen by indecision about how to prepare, or whether to continue on, business as usual. By utilizing a proper pivot readiness approach, companies can be ready for whatever comes, as well as make their organization stronger and more capable for the future, regardless of what it brings.

Change Readiness: Beyond Just a ‘Plan B’

At alliant, we have deep and direct experience with change management and pivot readiness, with our fluency extending to both the public and private sector alike. alliant’s own Dr. Robert Ambrose used this preparedness method during his time at NASA, where he was the former Chief of Software for the Robotics and Simulation Division at NASA’s Johnson Space Center. During his tenure, Dr. Ambrose navigated organizational pivots within some of our nation’s most mission-critical institutions.

“We referred to our initial template as the nominal plan,” says Dr. Ambrose, “the baseline course of action one would follow if nothing unexpected occurs. Though possible, this is typically one of the lowest-percentage outcomes. As such, we develop a contingency plan for all the likeliest deviations from this nominal plan.” This is precisely what pivot readiness provides.

You Can’t Predict Everything, But You Can Prepare

The DOGE fallout has shown how necessary these contingency plans are for every government contracting organization. Especially in the current climate of unpredictable changes, cancelled contracts, and delayed payments, sticking to one lone ‘nominal plan’ may put your whole operation at risk.

The bright side is that every company can follow this preparedness playbook. It may take a lot of work, but it remains a simple and universal method. The two-pronged process starts with all the potential things outside your company’s purview that may go wrong, change, or tangentially impact you in some way. The second, more difficult part entails forming a specific, detailed plan of action for each change of course, or contingency—laying out the necessary steps required and how exactly you would execute them. Once this is established, your organization should prepare for each scenario in proportion to its likelihood.

This is easier said than done, and alliant’s decades of combined change readiness experience means we’re prepared to help you through all the most granular parts of the process. We help you determine the ideal contingency options based on your singular organizational identity, as well as the actionable steps to carry them out.

The alliant Advantage

alliant Managing Partner, Joy Taylor, describes using this approach to help clients in all industries prepare for change. “When organizations approach potential workforce adjustments reactively, they often sacrifice strategic positioning for short-term stability,” she says, “The most successful institutions recognize that disruption—while challenging—creates unique opportunities for those prepared to move with intention rather than merely respond.” Pivot readiness should be thought of not merely as a helpful insurance policy but a critical opportunity to strengthen your organization.

The fact is, most government contracting companies are wholly capable of surviving a sudden shockwave, whether to their contracts, the economy, or otherwise. The trouble stems from the extensive time investment and specialized skillset needed to analyze one’s internal change variables, let alone a develop a blueprint for how to put them into action.

How We Can Help

For this reason, alliant is offering a two-day workshop to discuss the inherent benefits that pivot readiness can bring to your organization. As our former government head, Dwight D. Eisenhower, once said, “Plans are nothing, planning is everything.” You may not follow any one plan to the letter, but the process itself will bring about invaluable and lasting readiness.

This is not just a guessing game or luck, but rather a scientific approach to change. For Joy, this entails an internal audit made to evaluate your organization’s core capabilities: what are you good at? what is your most valuable capability? Success lies in taking an agnostic look at the full toolkit and developing a plan from that foundation.

All-Too-Common Pitfalls

These include attributes like what a company excels at regardless of context or situation. A manufacturing facility, for example, may have a lucrative contract producing high-volume specialty parts for a government contract. If they’ve been doing this day-in and day-out for years on end, they may easily forget that they’re capable transitioning to a private industry, such as aviation, and the concrete steps this pivot would entail. Without a proper plan in place, they might end up taking the first available low-hanging fruit, becoming caught up in a web of small-time contracts that only keep them afloat on a temporary basis.

Structure Begets Strength

In government contracting especially, change is a ‘when’, not an ‘if’. When things suddenly fall apart, it’s difficult enough to stick to any plan, let alone one you don’t have full confidence in. As Dr. Ambrose put it, “Engineering complex systems—whether spacecraft or organizations—requires understanding fundamental capabilities, constraint parameters, and adaptation mechanisms,” He says, “The most resilient systems aren’t those that resist change, but those designed with change parameters already incorporated into their architecture.”  No one can say for certain when change will come. But change is separate from readiness, and that pays dividends no matter the outcome.

Please join us in our workshop to learn more about how it could benefit your organization.