The Danger & Opportunity in a Crisis
“The Chinese use two brush strokes to write the word ‘crisis.’ One brush stroke stands for danger; the other for opportunity. In a crisis, be aware of the danger — but recognize the opportunity.”
John F. Kennedy
For a couple of weeks after the coronavirus lockdown started there was an image doing the rounds on Twitter and LinkedIn of a simple survey question that asked ‘Who led the digital transformation at your company?’. The multiple-choice answer options were CEO, CTO and COVID-19, with the latter circled.
The brilliant marketing cartoonist Tom Fishburne followed this up with an incisive cartoon showing an executive addressing his team in a corporate meeting room. ‘Digital transformation is years away’ says the executive, ‘I don’t see our company having to change anytime soon’, as a giant wrecking ball with COVID-19 written on it sweeps in to destroy all before it.
The image and the cartoon are funny but also wonderfully penetrating in their interpretation of what’s really going on in business. Suddenly words like ‘unprecedented’ and phrases like ‘the end of business as usual’ and ‘new normal’ have overtaken ‘getting our ducks-in-a-row’, or ‘running-things-up-flagpoles’, or ‘circling-back’ as the most cliched pieces of corporate jargon.
COVID-19 is not only catalysing the need for new ways of working at scale and speed, but driving a double-decker bus through corporate norms, plans and assumptions. Yet the reality is that many organisations and teams have been blindsided. Organisations that over decades have been optimised for efficiency are suddenly realising in high-fidelity just how fragile they have become.
In a recent FT cover piece, economist Tim Harford describes eloquently why, in the face of clear risks, we so often fail to prepare for disasters and why the gap between recognising danger and taking action can sometimes be so large. What psychologists call normalcy bias can easily lead to people underestimating the impact and likelihood of a significant negative event because of our natural tendency to believe that things in the future will get back to the way that they have functioned in the past. Optimism bias can lead to a sense that, whilst bad things might happen, they are less likely to happen to us. And social cues from others or herd instinct can also be a powerful influence contributing towards inaction. Put simply, if other people do not appear to be behaving differently, we are less likely to act differently ourselves which can potentially have a compounding affect.
Yet there is hope for businesses facing this perfect storm. In his book Black Swan, Nicholas Nassim Taleb talks about how today’s complex systems (like the stock market or a large organisation) become fragile through flawed methods of forecasting and assessing risk which underplay the possibility of low probability yet high impact events. In his subsequent book Antifragile, he defines the difference between the concepts of robustness and resilience. If being fragile means that you break without any significant alteration, then being robust is about the ability to resist against known changes and stresses, and resilience is being able to absorb or react to disturbances by re-establishing as close as possible to the original state. But an antifragile system is one that improves as a result of stresses and failures.
And that’s what businesses need to do. For teams and leaders to find ways to not only survive but also to thrive in the new reality. To be antifragile. After years of paying lip-service to the importance of agility, the reality is that many organisations have not significantly challenged or changed outdated ideas of strict hierarchies, slow decision-making, top-down leadership and as a result they have become fragile. In rapidly moving, unpredictable environments this creates risk. John Hagel and John Seely Brown at Deloitte have described the necessary shift as one from ‘scalable efficiency’ to ‘scalable learning’. If we are to become fit-for-purpose for this new world then more than ever we need to realise that advantage is shifting towards those teams and business that value organisational learning and adaptability over simply leveraging scale and efficiency. Put simply, we need to learn fast at scale.
Our current situation is shattering corporate inertia. Now is the time and the opportunity to do a reset. A reset of team culture. A reset of team operating model. A reset of leadership behaviour.
Nine-time Olympic swimming champion Mark Spitz once said ‘if you fail to prepare, you’re prepared to fail’.
Here at Coteam we believe that there will be profound, catalytic shifts in the behaviours and expectations of our employees and our customers. Practising what we preach, Coteam was founded by Nick Villani and brings together top experts from across the field to deliver robust and impactful learning programmes to help any team adjust to this new reality. Featuring interactive webinars, tools, and coaching, our Remote Team Hackathon and Adaptive Leadership incubator will help you function better, find competitive advantages and become antifragile in times of rapid change.
Originally published at https://coteam.org on April 24, 2020.
