Business Agility in Finance: How CFOs Can Thrive in Volatility and Uncertainty

Melissa Howitzson: Foreign. Welcome to the CFO Show. I'm your host, Melissa Howitzson, CFO of Vena. As we think about what 2026 will bring, the only certainty we have is uncertainty and when uh, outcomes inevitably deviate from the plan. It's our job as finance leaders to be agile. In this episode we'll discuss what helps companies to survive and even thrive during economic volatility and why business agility, rather than just finance agility is the goal to aim for. Joining me is Mitch Max, founder of Better View and executive in residence for the association of Financial Professionals. Mitch, welcome to the show.

Mitch Max: Great to be here.

Melissa Howitzson: You've had a really exciting career. You've ended up as a consultant and you do a lot around the EPM space. You also teach and you're involved with afp. Can you tell us a bit about your journey and what you've been doing?

Mitch Max: So I'm an accountant by training. I did my CA now CPA here in Toronto and uh, a long time ago and then got into industry pretty quickly off and was working in, in corporate finance and started really early into the planning and forecasting area. That was my, my start work and eventually got myself from industry into consulting and have really been in the consulting world for quite a long time. I was a partner with uh, a large national firm here in based of Toronto. Then ultimately um, have been doing a number of different areas, uh, both independent and corporate consulting work. So that's been my consulting background and consulting has always been in the performance management space and through that have been working in helping clients select software, implement tools, define processes, uh, and transform their finance functions and operations. And that's kind of what I did for a good chunk of my world. And then the last big piece I did was actually running a large consulting practice itself. Um, and I was doing that for about almost five years. Along the way have sort of been transitioning into other components of that. One of the fun things I picked up um, about seven, eight years ago was to start teaching um, and so I was very fortunate to get appointed as they call a sessional lecturer at uh, the Rotman School uh, for Management at U of T University of Toronto and have been teaching operations management strategy there for the past uh, seven years. Um, so it's a, it's a side hustle, but it's a really fun side hustle. And then the AFP side has come along the way. Being exposed to various software vendors, being exposed to various um, communities got me involved with the association for Finance Professionals and I was a member of their advisory board. Um, for a number of years, I've been attending their conferences and sessions and helping with content forever. Then recently they asked me to serve as executive in residence. And so I've been doing that and doing research as part of that lately. So that's kind of where I've been.

Melissa Howitzson: And the research that you're doing, working with that organization, um, is a great organization. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

Mitch Max: I was looking for something that would be intriguing and relevant for me, um, that would be different than what people were looking at. And so I leaned into what I was teaching at U of T, which is in the operations management strategy work. And we've, uh, been working and as we've come through Covid, during live time, during this process, I started looking at agility and how companies were maintaining flexibility, what was defining that and how they were growing, what was changing in that. And so then I wanted to tie that together with finance's role. And so that was what intrigued AFP to say, how can we look at these two things together? Is there, what is agility in a company and what is finance's role in supporting that agility? And that was the combination that kind of came together to say, is there something interesting here?

Melissa Howitzson: Well, and this topic of agility is so relevant. You think about, you know, you mentioned Covid, but you know, there's been never ending uncertainty, I'd say, before COVID but that certainly was a new wave of uncertainty. And since then, it's, it's been all kinds of new things, whether it's the backdrop of what's happening in an economy, geopolitical supply chain. Uncertainty is the new certainty in terms of how we're operating. So, so how have you seen agility play in and what helps businesses thrive or survive through those times?

Mitch Max: We have to have an acronym for everything. So the acronym is vuca. Volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity. So it's not the uncertainty by itself, it's the volatility of it and the complexity of the changes and the fact that we really don't know, we don't have an answer for what's going on. And, and without getting into the politics, uh, tariffs is a great example. And there's universal statements around finance professionals around this. For example, things that are changing on a daily basis. In finance, we love to make decisions based on things that we know we can weigh it out, we can even weigh out probabilities of things. But when they're cycling on a daily basis or a weekly basis, and you don't know the amplitude of that. And you don't know which way it's going to go. And you know that it could go 180 degrees in either direction. It makes it really, really hard to operate. And I know you probably deal with this day in and day out in your life. So that's the backdrop of how this kind of stuff comes together. When I think about how, uh, organizations manage in this structure, when I was teaching, I teach about flexible organizations and flexibility in the way they manage their staffing, flexibility in the way they configure assets and plants, flexibility in terms of how they set up their finances, for example, to handle lines of credit that can expand and manage to handle things. So all these areas around operational flexibility, there's insurance that you can take to handle different scenarios and things like that. So we have all these tools that help us do that. And I thought, okay, that's great. That's the answer. And it turns out that that's part of the answer, but it's not the real answer. In Covid, we all picked up different things. I decided I wanted to learn how to bake bread. I thought it'd be kind of a cool thing to do. So you can go out, you can buy all the great tools and you can watch all the great videos and do all this kind of stuff, but I can't make a sourdough boule look perfect for the life of me, no matter how many videos I watch. It's about how you learn the trade and what you do with it and the experience of doing it 10,000 times that makes the difference. So it's not the tools and the methods and the capabilities. It's how it all sits in the culture of the organization that becomes really, really interesting. And turns out that there's been a lot of research in how this operates and what changes from one company to another company. Um, McKinsey did some research work prior to Covid, actually, 2017, 2018. And when they looked at what made companies thrive during periods of volatility and uncertainty, um, what they came back with was five key factors that made the difference. And they're not about the operational models that go on in the companies. They are about culture. So we're talking about having people understand what they call the North Star, making sure that everybody really gets it and understands what are the things that are important to the company. Um, we're talking about networks of teams and how teams are being organized and how they operate in a very. In a. In an agile manner and how they Work together. We talk about cycles of how people make decision making. Making decisions in very short bursts, short scrums, short sprints. A concept of it's better to be 70% accurate in your decision making now than to try for 100% certainty a month from now. Getting to that level of uh, structure is very challenging. This concept of trust and dynamics in the way organizations work together so that you have this ability to create teams that can self manage and be effective. And then on top of that having the technology for real time information that can enable that all to work together. Those are the five things that they pulled out that really helped to cement this cultural difference in the way organizations were thriving. And they found that only about 10% of uh, companies really thrived during COVID But those 10% did exceptionally well at the end of it. What they describe and what we see is kind of a decision framework that's very different. My friend and mentor, the late Steve Player, talked about uh, concept of the OODA loop, which was a technique that was developed by the um, American army and M Air Force actually during World War II when they had a way of looking at how to intercept the enemy and approach that. And that was observe, orient, decide and act. Um, I've simplified that a little bit. I think what we really have is a three part model called Sensing, decision and action or sense, decide and act. And what that really means is that organizations need the ability to sense what's going on early, to have that information come transparently and quickly to them and to see signals that are maybe not jumping out and screaming at them, uh, and to do that quickly. Then they need the capabilities to make decisions, which means they need scenarios, they need different ways of thinking about where it could go. You don't just want an A and a B. You want to know a range of things so you can make those. And then you need the capability of act, which also means the capability of monitoring and seeing how things are going and have that feedback. So those are the elements that we kind of see in place that are helping organizations um, not just to survive in these periods of uncertainty, but to thrive.

Melissa Howitzson: And it is so key to have the right culture to be able to use the tools, to be able to survive, to be agile. And sometimes in finance we don't necessarily see ourselves as those agents of change on the culture yet we have a critical role, I would say, to play in that. It's not just an HR thing, it is something that comes from the top and across your leadership. How are you going to foster the right conditions within a business and finance, even how all of our team members are contributing to that culture in ways that we may not even appreciate, that are either opening people's minds to being able to be agile or think differently versus shutting down things and saying, no, this is how we do it or how we've always done it. So for companies that are looking to assess their culture, or if they need to start to move their culture towards something that can be more agile, what advice would you have for them?

Mitch Max: When we look at companies that have really moved the needle on this, what we find is that the. The secret sauce at. At a high level is business partnering that is embedded within the business. So most organizations have moved at some level to say, finance is my partner, right? The days where finance. I grew up in the days where finance was the enemy. Like you, you didn't tell them stuff because you didn't want them to make sure they caught things a certain way. We've come a long, long way from there. So finance is the partner. But the way finance partners varies tremendously from company to company. And the most successful companies that are working in this way are where finance is directly embedded within the business teams. And there's a continuum of how that looks. Sometimes it's finance shows up at the quarterly meetings. Okay, that's fine. At the opposite end of the spectrum, you've got companies like Uline, for example, was telling me that the finance people are literally in the operations. They take turns, just like everybody else, going out and working in the factories for a while to try to understand what's going to the warehouses, the DCs that they're doing, right, to try to understand what's going on so that they are part of every single decision process. And so that when things are happening in real time, finance is engaged because they're in the moment with them. And they have organizational context to understand what's driving that. And they can help make business decisions that incorporate risk, that incorporate grounded reality and bring that together. So that's the gold standard, in my view, of how organizations really make it. Now, they may not get there all the time. You have this duality of some organizations where the finance people are in the business, but they still are reporting into the finance arm, others where it's kind of pivoted and they have a dotted line to this, to the cfo. That can vary culturally, but that's kind of the gold standard to think about is how do I really, really, really get finance embedded into the company so that I can have that operate within that framework, I think. Then I come back to my sense Decide act structure. So what can finance do to help in the sensing part? Right, so that's understanding what's going on, it's helping with surfacing data in tools of helping to get things cleaned up properly, to ensure that the right metrics are being brought forward and to serve as that early warning system when things are starting to go out of whack. So there's a big piece of that on the Decide framework. It's helping create scenario tools that are everyday scenario tools that are working. Google for example, uses an OKR mechanism, um, but that is implemented in every decision point with scenarios. So when they're discussing whether to make a given investment in something or to build something out in a certain way or any kind of decision that they're making, they're evaluating their OKRs, which are kind of like KPIs, right. And they're evaluating it against uh, a whole list of scenarios that they're considering at each time. So when they're saying well are we going to do this? They're going to look at the scenarios, they're going to look at the probability associated with each of those scenarios, they're going to look at the impact of those things and make decisions and then they're going to come back to that each quarter and say how are we doing that is part of this process. We're talking about rolling forecasts, we're talking about driver based capabilities, we're talking about all of these tools that finance can use to help inform better, faster decision making. And that's a big piece of what we're doing. And then on the act side it's the measurement, it's the translation of that into the way the organization works. It's seeing how things are going on a day to day basis and kind of driving that out.

Melissa Howitzson: Let's talk about EPM then in this context and how it fits in. Enterprise performance management absolutely has a role to play play in this. How do you see it? You know, as does it enable this is it at the core, how does it come to bear and help with driving an agile organization?

Mitch Max: EPM's origins and some of what gave it its structure initially was it's the budgeting tool. Um, so it's the thing we use to do our budgets. Right. But that was always the lifeline of what it is. But that's not epm, that's not what is really critical to this. Um, and there are, I think clearly there's the tool component, the Functionality component that we understand. So it's rolling forecasts, it's driver based capabilities and planning, it's scenario analytics, it's better reporting. Now we're seeing AI as components and tools to help drive better understanding of analytics and everything around that. So that's a piece of it, but that's not all of it. The workflow capabilities, the collaborative capabilities. So this comes back to the culture. It's not just about how do I have the right tools to do the stuff, it's how do I make sure that it actually gets used in the organization in a dynamic, effective, quick way to pull that together. And that's the, that's where it becomes really interesting, is to see how it can be not just a tool, but the enablement of a very different culture.

Melissa Howitzson: One of the things that I found is in the pursuit of more data and analytics and the analysis that we want to provide with our businesses, data overload has become a real thing. We are swimming in it now. How have you seen systems be used effectively to put more rigor into the data? And what advice would you have for leaders when it comes to data and how to make sure that you don't end up just swimming in it?

Mitch Max: That is a big challenge, um, no question about it. And we are, we are pulling all this data together in a very, uh, structured way and very quickly. I think there's a couple things that are happening. The ability to understand data in dimensions and to be able to look at it across different, in different ways and slice it and dice it and plan that way and look in different time series and things like that is critically important. And so this multidimensional, analytic, multidimensional planning, cube based kind of approaches, uh, are really critical to help that along. I think we are seeing an emergence of AI, uh, and deeper learning and analytics as a way of guiding that. Because humans could only do so much, it can only kind of work their way through that to a certain degree. And you need to find ways of supercharging that. And so uh, that's also a piece. But the other thing that happens is that we start to get into it and realize that the data may not be perfect. And particularly when you're doing this kind of analysis where you're looking at different things, um, granularity becomes important. I might know that sales are rocking at a certain level, um, and I might be able to plan it at certain points. But the interesting analytics always come at the lower levels of grain, where you know which products, which regions, which sales teams, where's that growth happening. And sometimes the inaccuracy of data and the inability to plan starts to hit the lower and lower you go. Um, this is a phenomenon in planning in general that you need granularity at a low enough level of detail to be interesting. And the lower you go, the harder it is to plan with accuracy. If I'm running a retail business I might know how many coats I'm going to sell. But knowing what size, what color and in which location at what time is the hard part of planning. So getting that all down there at that level of grain is always challenging. And then what we find as you get down there is we don't necessarily have accurate data. Um, and that's the Achilles heel of this process.

Melissa Howitzson: And so what are you seeing businesses do about that?

Mitch Max: Challenge the good thing when people start to implement these tools, um, invariably they start to explore the granularity and the issues in the data and they start to explore the processes and the tools that are throwing that all together and bringing that in. So understanding and driving into that and finding the errors and aligning the data and aligning the dimensionality and aligning the terminology is um, a good and an appropriate and I would say best practice uh, as part of implementing these kind of capabilities.

Melissa Howitzson: You did bring up AI and that's inevitable. It's top of mind for many of us and especially when we think about wanting to be agile organizations helping our businesses make better smarter decisions. AI certainly can play a role in that but we have to be smart about how we're going to use it. So curious what your thoughts are in terms of where does AI play a role in this, in helping us to be agile as leaders?

Mitch Max: We're certainly seeing an evolution of this. Um, early days um, we were seeing um, AI as tools to help write basic variance analysis and understand things and automate some basic tasks. And we've certainly seen some work in terms of data cleansing um, and data preparation which is critical um, as it gets through. So we've seen some very task oriented kind of things happen, happening. Um, now we're seeing a shift towards more analytical capabilities in this and to building out um, helping people find anomalies in data, trends in data, um, underlying issues, potentially understanding um, some of the causal relationships that are in data um, and that is going to continue to I believe explode. Uh, as we're building um, I think we're also entering a third wave where people are, the agentic models are going to start being able to take through and really build out some of that core functionality that we need to have. That doesn't mean that humans are going away in this process. Um, I think it's going to mean that we're going to have rethink how we train our analysts to operate in a, in an agentic world and to make sure that there is still stuff that they can grow in and build. Um, and that, that's, I think, going to be the interesting challenge for the finance community over the next little while.

Melissa Howitzson: Definitely a topic I hear often coming up in finance circles as people, as we're all thinking about, okay, what is that next? Where's this going? What are the skills we're going to need and how are we going to make sure that we do this in a state way that's very safe and controlled? Because, uh, you know, risk is always top of mind for us as well. And I think we're starting to find ways to have frameworks around that to be able to set up the right infrastructure. But, uh, there's no question we got

Mitch Max: to embrace it, but learn how to know how to trust and how to build around it. Every time I look at my AI tool of choice, it warns me that it may have, may, may make mistakes. And I know that it makes mistakes.

Melissa Howitzson: Yeah.

Mitch Max: Um, but having the experience to understand when a mistake is there or potential for a mistake and to guide these tools, they're going to get better. They're going to get better, they're going to learn, and they're learning at an exponentially increasing rate. Um, I've been at this game a long time, and I don't think I've ever seen an explosion of capabilities, um, like I've seen over the last two years. I think that's going to be an interesting process to see how it plays out.

Melissa Howitzson: Yeah, I always say it's, it's never been in a more exciting time that to be in finance than right now. What we're living here because I think we have a real important role to play in it, and some exciting things are coming our way and we need to help our businesses because as this comes along, things move quicker than ever. And this need to be agile and help our businesses figure out how to maneuver their way through this is more critical than ever before. I let you go in your mind, what is the hallmark of a mature finance organization in terms of how they operate?

Mitch Max: This concept of business partnering that we referred to earlier, when you see business that is financed, that is really, really engaged and embedded within the business and able to build that out, that is probably the one thing that stands out to me as number one. I think number two is finance. That is focused forward, that is looking at what's coming, that is understanding scenarios, that is helping to identify risks and opportunities and bringing solutions to the business, because that's what the business wants. Um, that's maturity.

Melissa Howitzson: I would absolutely agree with you. Thank you so much for joining me today. I've really appreciated having this discussion, and it's always great to have guests here in person to have the conversation.

Mitch Max: Great to be here. Thank you.

Melissa Howitzson: If you've enjoyed this episode, we'd love your support. Follow the show and leave us a rating or review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. It's one of the best ways to help more finance professionals discover the show. For the CFO show, I'm Melissa Howitzson. Until next time. Mhm.