Never waste a good crisis — part 2 — COVID-19 and what we can learn
Never waste a good crisis — part 2 — COVID-19 and what we can learn
What a crisis teaches us about planning & prioritisation
What a crisis teaches us about planning & prioritisation
What can this teach us when thinking about Product development? I will walk through the concepts and takeaways that this live example of COVID-19, which touches every business and every consumer, can teach us.
Start part 1 here of my 6-part series here:
COVID-19 and what we can learn
In the years leading up to the COVID-19 global pandemic, corporate businesses were starting to shift investments toward digital transformation programmes. Using the language of the adoption cycle, this sees Early Adopters through to Late Majority engaging in these digital change programmes. Studies show more than 70% of businesses had a digital transformation programme in progress or in planning.
What is often associated with digital transformations within the Late Majority, especially within the Enterprise segment, were large multi-year transformation programmes. These programmes have a reputation for being mired in traditional waterfall planning and are notorious for high failure rates.
Operation: Warp Speed
With the onset of growing COVID case counts and lockdowns, the need for massive shifts to work from home was unavoidable if businesses wanted to continue to operate. We saw many companies embrace digital transformations that in many cases were implemented in days or weeks.
At SEEK Asia where I was CIO, we shifted over a thousand staff across 8 countries to work from home in just over a week. In the days before we started, we engaged with some consultancies to check that we had covered our bases from a planning and risk perspective. A recurring observation from these firms was that larger companies they were working with were leveraging elements of plans established as part of pre-existing digital transformation programmes. And similar to our situation they were now successfully executing dramatic adoption of digital technologies within weeks what had been planned to occur over multiple years.
We should all be falling off our home-office seats at what this massive acceleration is telling us about our most important and significant investments of the past few decades! It calls into question the industry of consultants and project management and the inability of corporations to prioritise and focus on supposedly transformative change.
Why we do and don’t adopt change
For my own organisation, we had already invested in infrastructure such as cloud services, soft-phone solutions, laptops and mobile devices, so we were well-positioned (they must have had a great CIO! 😜). And we had established a change of practices to facilitate the possibility for all to work from home. All of this was established long before the pandemic and was in use by some teams, primarily the ‘knowledge-working’ teams such as product development, strategy and marketing.
These solutions were not yet in use by our sales and service teams i.e. our phone-reliant teams, so in effect, more than half of our organisation were not yet taking advantage of these new capabilities. Adoption of technologies such as softphones was seen by those teams as not essential — which up until there was a pandemic I guess was somewhat true.
On the other hand, given the flexibility such capabilities afford us, what might we have been missing out on by not adopting technologies more widely? Did it mean a significant portion of our organisation was caught standing still in relation to changing attitudes and expectations about flexibility and companies’ supporting working from home? Was there talent we were unable to attract? People whose situations we could not support due to the lack of flexibility? What might the impact of that be competitive?
I’ve got to imagine there were other options for me to communicate the benefits of these technologies which didn’t involve simulating a pandemic. While I already held the view that communicating change in the context of the outcomes the change would bring about and measuring progress relative to the positive effects (and monitoring for negative effects) - this experience has made me wonder whether we can be even more ambitious. Are there learnings which are repeatable outside of pandemic conditions? Can we bottle it?
No doubt there is some refinement and improvement of what has been implemented in these rapid digital transformations. For instance, security was a big focus for us in the change but I worry for many companies it was an area of compromise.
What is clear to me: there was significant waste and fat in these digital transformation plans and this crisis has been almost the perfect razor. Even if the overall effort was the same it highlights not enough incremental delivery and validation of value and high-likelihood of effort that would not translate into value due to comparatively less immediate feedback cycles and being tested by reality.
Through the advent of the pandemic, it had become clear to most organisations what parts were essential and what the pragmatic path of adoption would be. It begs the following questions:
Why was this the case? Is it possible to achieve this level of insight during normal times? What value was not captured due to unnecessary delay? Does this equally apply in the Product space?
Next, I look at failure within the context of a crisis and how we can learn from it:
This has been part of a continuing series of posts:
