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The coronavirus crisis has vast biological, economic, leadership, political, social, and moral implications that will be felt for years, if not decades. New ways of working. New ways of playing. New ways of learning. New ways of leading. New ways of living. Everything will be different. This is the mother of all disruptions. It is ushering in a new age.

The crisis is thus proving to be a Great Accelerator. The crisis is speeding up some negative trends. Aspiring authoritarians are using the emergency to test the limits of civil rights and to consolidate power at the expense of democracy. Public bailouts of those affected risk being diverted for political purposes. Civil rights including privacy are also at risk.

Yet the crisis is also accelerating positive changes that were already underway, including the shift to digital and virtual work and learning, enhanced international collaboration, emergent leadership at the periphery, public service contributions in a spirit of solidarity, and above all, an acceleration of organizational adaptation.

Performance varies widely. In the public sector, different governments and agencies have exhibited strikingly different degrees of dexterity, ranging from bureaucratic ineptitude to impressive quickness. The differences in adaptability have led to markedly different outcomes in terms of the impact of the disease in both biological and economic terms, Yet early gains by strong performers are easily lost if vigilance slips.

In the private sector, business agility, which was already a major organizational trend in the last few years, has become an overriding priority with at least six interconnected dimensions.

1.     Health and Safety

2.     The Mechanics Of Adapting

3.     Strategic Opportunities and Risks

4.     Internal Upgrading

5.     Upgrading Business Agility Itself

6.     Longer-Term Implications: Where Is This Leading?

1.     Health And Safety

The coronavirus crisis is in its origin a human tragedy. The lives and livelihoods of many human beings have already been drastically impacted. In the absence of treatment or vaccine or favorable mutation, the virus will pose continuing risks to human health and safety for years to come. Dealing with the challenges of health and safety is key to resolving all the other issues.

Firms must seek to do no harm, i.e. run their businesses in a way that doesn’t further endanger the life and health and safety either of those doing the work (staff) or of those for whom the work is being done (customers), while also meeting their own responsibilities to act as good corporate citizens.

Maintaining the primacy of delivering value to customers from safe workspaces must remain the overriding goal. Firms should enable people to safely leave their homes, resume some version of their former lives, and help restart the economy, all the while preserving privacy and civil liberties.

This is easier said than done, given the fact that the early stage of infection with the virus, when there are few or no symptoms, coincides with the period when the amount of virus being emitted from an infected person’s cells may be the highest.

Currently, there is much public discussion of the health and safety challenges being encountered faced by firms that provide essential services and have continued to work through the various lockdowns, such as health, food, and security. These firms have faced multiple challenges including shifting public signals, shortages of equipment and supplies, and unexpectedly high infectiousness.

These challenges will soon be experienced by all firms when they start going back to work. Actions such as the use of social distancing, personal protective equipment, testing, tracing, and quarantining, will need to be combined with transparency, collaboration, and trust. Perceptions of safety will be just as important as actual safety.

Given the risk that public policies and practices will be less than ideal or reliable in many jurisdictions, firms will need to be ready where appropriate to make their own assessments of the risks and innovate rapidly to develop new solutions to specific health and safety challenges.

2.     The Mechanics Of Adapting

The second dimension concerns the mechanics of adapting to the rapidly shifting conditions. Firms that are well along in digitizing both internal workflows and external interactions like Riot Games are able to operate virtually by working from home through Zoom and other sharing technologies. Such firms are exploring the pluses (less travel) and minuses (interruptions from other family members). Firms are also exploring innovative ways of doing Agile practices such as virtual standups, team planning, and retrospectives.

When it comes to working together again in offices, firms will need to manage an array of internal and external factors. They will need to establish that the workforce is healthy enough for a return, along with properly functioning community health and hospital systems. For customer-facing firms, firms will need to ensure not only that environments are safe but also that workers and customers feel safe in returning.

Pending discovery of therapeutics or a vaccine, this will mean continuing attention within the workplace to social distancing in workspaces and cafeterias, health monitoring, the supply of personal protective equipment, testing, and quarantining.

Accessing promised bailout money from imperfect public mechanisms has also proved a challenge for many. In the U.S., small business loans through the Economic Injury Disaster Loan program have been plagued by long delays and inadequate capital. Learning how to master these systems will be, for adversely affected firms, the price of survival.

3.     Strategic Opportunities and Risks

A third dimension concerns the strategic risks and opportunities, i.e. the damage to existing businesses and the creation of new businesses. In terms of damage to the existing business, firms sit along a spectrum. Firms like Netflix, Riot Games, and Clorox appear to be in improved strategic positions. At the other end of the spectrum, firms like bars, restaurants, hotels, and airlines, are basically out of business, at least for now, unless they can obtain support from the government. And there is everything in between.

The marketplace is obviously changing very rapidly with new risks and opportunities emerging almost every day. For firms that can move quickly are benefiting, while firms that are unable to adapt will be in difficulty.

4.     Upgrading Internal Processes

The fourth dimension concerns the possibility of firms taking advantage of the crisis to review and upgrade internal processes. Most firms of any size are generally well aware of how much time is wasted with existing processes, with estimates of time wasted ranging from 20% to more than 50%. Since everything has now to be reinvented in a digitized and virtual mode, why not upgrade all processes in line with business agility?

There is no reason to emulate slow-moving bureaucratic paper-based processes in digital form. Instead, processes can be re-imagined with a lens of business agility, following the Three Laws of Agile: an obsession with generating customer value, working in small self-organizing teams in short cycles and functioning as a competence based-network rather than a vertical authority-based hierarchy. All systems and processes including budgeting and human resources should be subject to rigorous review.  In principle, anything that isn’t generating value for external customers should be eliminated. As former White House Chief of Staff  Rahm Emanuel remarked in 2008, prior to taking office, “You never want a serious crisis go to waste.”

5.     Upgrading Business Agility Itself

Just as the coronavirus crisis is forcing businesses to reinvent themselves, so it is also forcing the reinvention of business agility itself. Thus, many of the practices of business agility were articulated for software development and were dependent on face-to-face meetings. Now that face-to-face meetings are often no longer possible, Agile practices need to be reformulated in more general terms so that they can be implemented virtually as well as face-to-face and more broadly so that they enable the whole organization to be agile.

In this context, strategic agility (creating new businesses) is emerging to be much more important than operational agility (making the existing business better). This implies a shift for the Agile movement which has mainly been focused on training software developers in operational agility. It will thus be important for trainers and coaches to become familiar with the principles of strategic agility, including the four keys to achieving strategic agility and the centrality of metrics to achieving strategic agility.

6.     Longer-Term Implications: Are We Heading Back To Normal?

The sixth dimension concerns longer-term implications. There are still many things we don’t know about the coronavirus and the crisis it has caused, i.e. the so-called “known unknowns”. As most countries don’t have adequate testing programs in place, we don’t even know the current incidence of the disease. There are also probably many things we think we know but don’t, i.e. the “unknown unknowns.”

Yet we can reasonably surmise that in the absence of a miraculous discovery of therapeutics or a vaccine or a favorable mutation of the virus, the crisis will go on for months and years, not just days and weeks as many firms and politicians have been assuming until recently. 

Even if the current wave of infections and deaths appears to recede, firms will need to plan for the risk that one or more new waves may follow, as Singapore is currently discovering.

While there is much talk of “returning to normal”, we need to consider whether “normal” is good enough. Is it normal for instance that a country that won two world wars, that put a man on the moon, that owns the most technologically advanced economy, that has the world’s best universities, that rapidly developed a vaccine against polio, is unable to implement the most obviously needed actions to mitigate the coronavirus pandemic?

Is it normal that the world’s foremost public health authority—the CDC—is seemingly unable to execute the most elementary actions to protect public health and safety?

Is it normal that the biggest and most sophisticated industrial country is unable to manufacture desperately needed medical equipment and supplies in a timely fashion?

Is it normal that government agencies don’t have the systems to get federal bailout money to the people and businesses that need it?

Is it normal that the richest economy in the world doesn’t have a health care system that provides health for all?

Is it normal that housing costs have spiraled so high as to become unaffordable?

Is it normal that we can’t build new cities or even maintain basic infrastructure?

Is it normal that our education systems are the best in the world at the high end but those systems are only accessible to very few?

Is it normal that, at a time of unparalleled technological innovation, so many organizations are protecting the status quo and propping themselves up with financial engineering, rather than promoting real growth with rapid transformation?

Is it normal that we are so addicted to our existing managerial habits, attitudes and practices, and to the massive financial incentives to maintain the status quo, that we are unwilling to see that we could have a better world for all?

Is it normal that we see, not just the missteps of single individuals, but rather systemic managerial and leadership breakdowns across an array of institutions and sectors?

Is it normal to make do with mediocrity? As American entrepreneur Marc Andreessen has asked, why don’t we aspire higher? Why not create a society that lives up to our best aspirations and capabilities?

In effect, instead of being satisfied with “getting back to normal”, why not aspire to “getting to better”?

And read also:

Six Actions The White House Must Take Now

Why Organizational Agility Is Key To Defeating the Coronavirus

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