What We Learned During COVID-19: Becoming an Adaptive & Resilient Organization

There was no way to imagine the impact that the coronavirus would have. In a study our team here at PH1 Research conducted in March we found that organisations were cautious about COVID-19 and expected it to be a moderate emergency.

As this crisis has moved into April and May, the economic severity is undeniable, with millions out-of-work in the tourism industry, non-profits losing funding, and higher education having to re-invent itself within a matter of weeks.

To help organisations get through these challenging times, PH1 Research is providing business leaders with free resources to improve their customer and employee strategies during this crisis. The resources include:

1. ‘3 lessons’ articles based on interviews with organisations who learned how to be adaptive and resilient (see below)
2. Free webinars featuring industry-leading thought leaders to help your organisation find the right path forward. Learn more at http://cxchallenges.com
3. Bi-weekly free working sessions. Contact info@ph1.ca for more info.

The final strategy and presentation can be found here as seen from the June 17 webinar.

Lessons to Help Your Organisation Through the COVID-19 Crisis

3 Lessons: Becoming an Adaptive & Resilient Organization

• 3 Lessons from Zahra Ebrahim (Civic Engagement): Their solution required no technical background and it helps communities precisely because of its simplicity. They wanted to create a resource that made it extremely easy to connect people needing help to resources offering help.
• 3 Lessons from Young Enterprise (Education/Charity): This crisis forced the charity to quickly re-think their entire model. The needs of teachers, youth workers, students, and parents all changed and the charity had to adapt to deliver support in new ways.
• 3 Lessons from CityStudio (Education): CityStudio brings innovation, engagement, and experimentation to Vancouver’s City Hall by uniting city staff with post-secondary students, faculty, and community.
• 3 Lessons from Dr. Angèle Beausoleil (Education): The abrupt shift from in-person to online classes meant that Dr. Beausoleil had 2 days to take in-person lab-based business design, innovation, and design thinking classes and rethink how to offer the same learning outcomes digitally.
• 3 Lessons About Adaptability & Resilience from Ernesto Peña, Ph.D (Charity/ Technology): As a technology platform which has the primary goal of making giving easy, he has had the privilege of being able to study topics such as why donors stop giving and what makes them comfortable to give to a charity for the first time.
• 3 Lessons About Adaptability & Resilience from Dr. Emma Aiken-Klar (Innovation/Anthropology): Having a renewed sense of purpose in spite of this uncertainty can help teams move through these moments of change. We’re no longer what we used to be and we’re not sure what we will become.
• 3 Lessons About Adaptability & Resilience from Tyson Villeneuve (Events/Hospitality): Events as an industry effectively flatlined and we were the first to get hit: Large sports events, festivals, gatherings. The entire industry was shut down two weeks before restaurants.
• 3 Lessons About Adaptability & Resilience from Dianne Dredge, Ph.D (Tourism / Community Engagement): Her lens from the perspective of regions and tourism ecosystems that had to completely rebuild provide lessons on how industries can become adaptive and resilient.

On June 17 PH1 presented a webinar How Organisations Become Adaptive & Resilient in a Time of Crisis based on our research of hundreds of orgs. You can see the final presentation here.

This series is part of PH1 Research’s mandate to provide business leaders free resources to improve their customer and employee strategies during the COVID-19 crisis.