Untypical Thoughts

Going through some photos yesterday, I found one that I took earlier this year in my home town, Geelong. It shows the sun rising over our waterfront, with the Geelong to Melbourne ferry in the left foreground and the silhouette of the waterfront Carousel building on the right. I don’t take many photos and so I was pretty pleased to create one this good!

It got me thinking though … for many businesses, a new dawn is approaching. The start of a new post-COVID-19 era. The opportunity to completely transform how they operate. The once-in-a-lifetime chance to re-establish their business with an innovative approach that is based on a “what if we started again” mindset. The opportunity to create an organisation that really meets the changed needs and expectations of their customers, employees and shareholders.

For several episodes now, I have been presenting Untypical Thoughts about what I think the business world will look like in the second half of the 2020 calendar year and beyond. One thing we can be certain of is that we can never go back to the way things worked before the unavoidable disruption of the global pandemic. If you haven’t already done so, I’d encourage you to listen to some of the previous episodes – they set a context for what I am about to say here.

I have spoken to a number of businesses who are placing an emphasis on the word SHOULD. When this is over, we SHOULD change our processes, we SHOULD let our staff work from home when they can, we SHOULD review the way we operate, etc, etc.

Well, maybe not as SIMPLE as A,B,C and D but I am certain that these letters stand for four key skills and attributes in the reset, re-establish and re-generation activities we spoke of a few episodes ago.

Let’s step through them one at a time …

In the last episode, we introduced the concept of Transformagination and I am glad to say that we have had a number of inquiries about how businesses can work with us to transformaginate their world.

The first step is accept the fact that there is a new normal. We don’t know what that looks like for your business specifically but we do know that the old normal is not where you want to focusing your attention. Things have changed and will continue to change dramatically as the post-COVID-19 world starts to emerge.

If you are a regular Untypical Thoughts reader (or podcast listener), you will have discovered that one of my all-time heroes is Albert Einstein. For many, he was seen as being the ultimate 20th Century physicist with his famous equation E = mc2. For others, he was a philosopher like no other. For me, having been fortunate enough to have studied Physics at university, he lands somewhere in between.

Last time, I provided my thoughts on the reset / re-establish / regeneration activities that businesses will need to go through to prepare themselves for life after the COVID-19 crisis passes.

I also suggested that there is a massive opportunity to reshape the future for your organisation. You might have noticed that there has been a bit of a theme throughout the past few Untypical Thoughts – that is, that you cannot afford to be constrained in your thinking by the way things used to be done within your organisation.

Last time, we talked about how there can be no turning back. So, given that we are where we are, we should consider the options for going forward.

One option is to keep going as your business currently operates – the meticulously planned or cobbled together business continuity model that has been employed for the past month or two. Having said that it is, I don’t think that it really is an option.

As I record this episode in April 2020, the world is in the middle of the most significant global health event that any of us can remember. Apart from the obvious impact on individual people and their families, COVID-19 has created a major crisis in businesses of all shapes and sizes.

Literally, no business is exempt or unaffected.

Even those that have become busier due to the goods and services they provide have had to have a serious re-think about how they operate.

… by clinging to the side of the pool.

At some point, if you want to learn to swim, you are going to have to leave the side of the pool and remove the safety net of being able to reach out and grab the ladder. Sure, there are steps you need to take and knowledge you need to learn before letting go but if you are ever going to learn to swim, you’ll need to just let go and give it a crack.

The other day, I bought a new football supporter’s scarf which had the following written on the label – one size fits most. It is certainly the first time I have seen that used on a garment but sadly, one size fits most – or worse, one size fits all – seems to be an over-used philosophy in many organisations and on many projects.

One thing I have learned during my years of managing change and, more recently, transformation projects is that the only thing we can be certain of is that one size fits one.