When you’re in the midst of a crisis, it can be hard to think past your short-term response. But, as a leader, your primary focus needs to be on the long term. … Your time should be dedicated to planning for the future. You need to anticipate the obstacles that will arise in the next weeks, months, and even years, and set a course for your organization accordingly. If you can focus on what lies ahead, rather than what’s happening now, you’re more likely to emerge from the crisis stronger than before.
HBR Tip of the Day Adapted from Are You Leading Through the Crisis … or Managing the Response?
The COVID-19 Coronavirus has upended the world economy. While the impact to date has been dramatic, this is not going to be a one-time event. Instead it represents a change to a new normal, a world with this virus circulating. This will have immediate, short term and medium-term consequences for businesses across all industries. In a recent Gartner webinar, analysts noted that remaking the organization as an effective remote enterprise has been everyone’s focus. But in the coming weeks and months Enterprises will begin to focus on cost optimization and then on seeking opportunities in the new environment. Some companies will succeed at this – they will adapt, survive and thrive in this new environment. Others will fail.
Now is the right time to be thinking about how you should adapt operations to cope with the new normal. You’ve already dealt with the immediate impacts like surges in VPN access, new laptop requirements, making processes work when people are working from home. Plus ,you’ve survived the immediate economic hit. Now it’s time to plan because this is not going away. The problems you are facing will change and evolve but there’s a new normal coming and you’ll want to have new systems and processes to cope.
The folks at McKinsey have been thinking about this too and have a great piece called Innovating from necessity: The business-building imperative in the current crisis. Three questions leapt out at me as critical:
- How will you create human-like interactions with customers you will never meet?
- How will you create resilience in your supply chain, without tying up more capital?
- How will you shift your costs and operations to variable structures to handle an increasingly volatile and dynamic world?
Our focus here at Decision Management Solutions is on digital decisioning – using our DecisionsFirst approach to apply technology and deliver automated solutions to decision-making problems. The systems we help our customers build address exactly these issues: they ensue our customers can personalize and target the digital interactions they have with customers; they deliver resilience, transparency and agility; and they support dynamic assignment and allocation.
We’ve learned a lot about building these kinds of systems over the decade or more we’ve been doing this and we’d like to share some tips and help you see how you can do it too. We’re going to be posting some content in the coming weeks to help you ensure your organization
- Can react to changes quickly and accurately
- Can build and sustain customer relationships remotely
- Can assign and manage resources dynamically
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